Little Wing
by icameherejusttosaythis
Summary: The crew of the long-distance research vessel, the Nixia, discover a mysterious object orbiting just beyond Tevura. Two thousand years later, Liara T'Soni follows a trail of clues left behind by her mother.
1. Chapter 1: The Little Wing

Wake the captain.

This was her first thought as sensors reported an unidentified contact, but she waited. Essa wanted to know more.

"What can we see?" she said.

From her station, the sensors operator projected the contact data onto the screens at the flight deck's left chair so she could look for herself. Essa cycled through the different arrays: visible light, infrared, radio, electromagnetic, x-ray, gravitational interference, particle detector. Visible light showed almost nothing. The others showed less, except that the contact was sitting at the bottom of a comparatively massive gravity well. The object itself was small. Perhaps it was just a previously unnoticed asteroid.

"We're sure it's not the probe?" Essa said.

"Too much mass," Sensors said.

Essa thought another moment. "Distance."

"Five million kilometers. Holding steady. It appears we are on parallel vectors."

"Right." She held her breath then said, "Wake the captain."

#

Twenty minutes earlier, the galley steward had brought up the mid-watch meal, pouches full of hot soup, tea, and the last of the ship's stores of fresh fruit. Essa had let the rest of the flight deck eat, while watching the stars rising over Tevura's night-dark upper limb. Auroras bloomed at the ice giant's northern pole. When it was her turn to eat, Essa counted three of Tevura's larger satellites rising behind the planet's narrow band of rings.

Beyond the spectacular view, third watch would likely be quiet. Never much to do, this time of night, aside from monitor the incoming radio traffic relayed—and more than two hours old by the time it reached them—from High Rock, and give the instruments an occasional scan to make sure everything was functioning properly.

They had been in Tevura's orbit for twenty days. Before that, they had made the fifteen-day journey from High Rock, a new installation still under construction on the largest of Parintha's asteroid. Half research station, half military base, it was becoming a formidable structure, the asteroid a virtual warren of tunnels and subsurface galleries, long range sensors, and all manner of antennae probing the darkness for who knew what. On the shuttle craft that had deposited them at High Rock, Essa had watched a battalion strength unit executing low-gravity maneuvers. Gearing for war, she thought, but with whom?

Ever since their arrival they'd been running a burn-and-drift pattern. Long, accelerations that slung them out on a high, elliptical path toward the far edge of the system, until the planet's gravity dragged them systemward again. At apogee, Parnitha looked almost as far away as all the other visible stars, but as Tevura reeled them back in, on their close pass, Essa could distinguish clearly between individual cloud tops, and count impact craters on the outer face of the innermost moon. All the while, they waited for the FTL probe that had departed three years ago on a mission to Orisoni, the star closest to Thessia's parent star Parnitha, to return.

It was ten days overdue, though this wasn't unexpected. The probe's automated systems were tuned to optimize speed and fuel consumption. And, of course, there were no instruments to accurately measure its speed. No, the probe would keep its own schedule. There was no reason to think it had failed. And the _Nixia _would be relieved from her vigil by her sister ship, the _Desinna_, in a few short days.

And so Essa concentrated on correcting the slight rotation that was making the _Nixia_ gently tilt its nose toward Tevura. Perhaps if she hadn't righted the ship at exactly that moment the sensors operator wouldn't have spotted the contact.

Now Essa cycled through the different displays, each one showing a slightly different view of the elliptical bubble of space that lay before them. She tried the visible light telescope again. It showed nothing—almost nothing. The stars appeared to change behind the object as it transited across them. The contact was moving, she thought, but that was all she had time to realize before the captain emerged onto the flight deck. She was awake, her demeanor and uniform showing no sign of having been roused from sleep. Essa watched as she pulled herself across the open space to the sensor operator's station.

"What can we see?" she said.

Essa observed the captain going through the same thought process she had a few moments earlier. The captain righted herself, and pushed across the cabin to the flight deck's left chair.

"First officer," she said. "You stand relieved."

Essa began to speak.

"You're relieved, Lieutenant," the captain said, more firmly this time. Essa blushed, and ground her teeth, but did as she was told. The two other crew on the flight deck watched her unbuckle from her harness and push herself across the cabin to the hatch. The navigator and sensors operator each gave a salute. She left the bridge without another word.

#

Down the long companionway that separated the bridge from the other decks of the ship, and wondering why she'd been dismissed, Essa arrived on the crew deck, lights dimmed and the usually noisy area empty at this hour of the watch. Ten crew members were asleep in bags strapped to the bulkheads, some pointing head-up, others head-down, depending on what was available. An unsecured drinking pouch hovered in the center of the room. Only the captain had a semi-private space, in a niche hidden behind the galley. At the moment, all the bags were full, as most of the crew kept to the same day-night cycle as the staff at High Rock. Essa and the rest of the third watch crew took any bag that was available when they were relieved in the morning, and perhaps because of this had grown accustomed to sleeping through all manner of noise.

But Essa suddenly wasn't thinking about a warm bed. Instead she let herself drift to the hatch to the deck below, opened the companionway and continued aft in the direction of the labs.

The _Nixia_ had taken on an extra dozen crewmembers at High Rock, two additional science officers and a "security team"—their purpose a mystery to her and the rest of the crew—who all kept to themselves in the hold below, the hatch barred from the aft side. The scientists were working on something down there, something noisy, the sound of their work traveling up through the struts that braced the hull. And the security team kept silent, sitting together and not talking to anyone at mealtimes, not even each other. Their uniforms bore no insignia, not for rank, or specialization identifiers. Not even their names.

The captain didn't discuss their purpose, and Essa knew better than to ask why their leader wore the black double-chevron shoulder patches of the Serrice Guards.

A generation ago a Guards commander might have sparked more interest with the crew than it did now. At one time in the relatively recent past the Guards had been the enemy, the elite of the Serrice military, back when they'd had fought against Armali and an alliance of smaller republics.

Respected. Feared. Hated. All those applied. It was rumored that a single team of Guards had assassinated three Armali matriarchs, in three separate locations, all on the same day. The war had eventually gone from hot to cold, had become a score settled through proxy conflicts—worker uprisings, mostly, the kind of unrest that blossomed readily in the poor working conditions of the offworld mining colonies founded in the asteroid belt and in the orbital shipyards being constructed over Thessia.

The Guards' commander was old enough to remember the conflict. She had a coil burn down her right arm, a reminder of the plasma torch that she'd once worn. She'd been a breacher during the war, one who made entry points for their comrades, cutting holes in the walls of buildings, or the hulls of spacecraft. The tubes that directed the hot gas to a nozzle on the operator's wrist were notorious for their poor heat shielding. Often enough they would injure or—especially in the vacuum of space—kill an operator who let it burn for too long.

Even so, the coil-scar that the commander liked to show off, always leaving the sleeves of her jumpsuit rolled to keep it in view, appeared to draw little attention from the _Nixia's _young crew. The _Nixia_—named after a small, swift predatory bird, known commonly as the "little wing"—was a maiden vessel. Most of her crew was well under two hundred years old. The youngest were on their first postings out of the academy. They had all studied the history of the centuries-long conflict between Serrice and the republics, but none but their captain had lived through any of it. That had been a long time ago. Stories their mothers might whisper among themselves, but never let trouble their daughters.

And now, peace between the republics. That was the era they lived in, the era most of the young crew had been born into: rapid scientific advancement, economic prosperity, expansion beyond geostationary orbit. The asari had, in the past fifty years, ascended from their homeworld of Thessia and were spreading throughout the system, establishing orbital stations around the gas giants Jainiri and Athame. That an old soldier was on boaard, a former enemy of many of the crew, should have seemed like a sign of continued progress. Or at least it would have, if the commander and her team weren't always locking themselves in the cargo bay, only coming up for meals, or to access the main airlock for live fire drills on the outside of the hull.

The regular crew all wore the green uniform patches that identified them as members of the peacetime scientific corps. None of them seemed that troubled by the commandos, though some asked why they had come. When asked, Essa told her crew to mind their business and focus on their work, advice she told herself to follow as she let herself drift down the passageway to the astronomy lab. On the way down to the science deck, she'd got the idea to access the more powerful telescope in the observatory.

She arrived at the terminal and buckled herself into the observatory's chair before she began running the search program that would help her aim the telescope toward the object.

"You won't be able to see it from here."

Essa jumped hearing the voice behind her. She turned to see the leader of the Serrice Guards hanging from one of the ladder-rungs mounted here and there to allow the crew to maneuver in microgravity.

Essa allowed herself to catch her breath before she said, "Goddess, you frightened me."

The commander smiled, though for her even this gesture seemed hostile. Even with only dim light from the outer passageway Essa could easily make out the scar on her arm. Perhaps she was staring.

The commander glanced at her arm, too, before moving closer. "You haven't even asked how I know."

Essa blinked, wondering what was coming next, and whether she could unstrap herself quickly enough to get free if there was some kind of confrontation. "I'm not sure what you're saying," she said.

"Ask me then. How do I know what you're looking for?"

"I don't," Essa said.

There was a pause. The commander moved closer. Even if Essa tried to escape now, she gathered she wouldn't be able. The commander stared hard then said, "You've been relieved from the watch, yes?"

Essa agreed that she had.

"I know that because third watch is yours. You should be running the ship."

All this time she was coming closer. Now her hand, her menacingly strong grip, was on Essa's shoulder.

"Do you know who I am?" the commander said.

"No one does. You or any of your—your foot soldiers." Essa bore down on the word _foot_, hoping the commander might take offense. The commander, unfazed, held out her hand. A little blue light, not unlike a flame, appeared in her palm, flickered and disappeared. A threat, Essa imagined. Her free hand reached to unlatch the straps of her seat. The commander pushed her back down into the seat.

"In my business, no one likes it when people go spying where they shouldn't."

"Business?" Essa said. "You're a killer."

"In my day, I was." She let Essa go, at the same time allowing herself to drift back against the bulkhead. "Now—now, I listen, and I watch. We may be at peace, but threats are everywhere." The way she turned her gaze, she seemed to be searching for the object, too, that was floating out there, just beyond their sight. "This object. Perhaps."

Essa blinked at her in the dark. The commander slowly drifted toward the ceiling. Let her try to frighten me again, she thought. Let her see what a green-patch can do. Perhaps the commander sensed this. Perhaps this was simply how she greeted everyone. Now she held out her hand, scarred flesh and all for Essa to take.

"I'm First Commandant Amair Razia, Serrice High Command, intelligence section."

They shook hands. Razia's scar seemed to leave an impression on Essa's palm.

"I'd ask why you're on my ship," Essa said.

"Be patient," Razia said. "Your mission and mine are about to converge."

With that she withdrew to the bulkhead on the far side of the compartment, hovering there, her hands braced against the padded ceiling. Essa stared again at the display, the search program having run its course showed no results, aside from the expected objects. Cryo-volcanoes on Tevura's third moon were jetting a plume of ice crystals a hundred kilometers high. Essa tried again.

"You won't find it," Razia said again. "What do you think I was doing up here?"

Essa shook her head. She should have known. She was about to say something, when an automated voice called out, "All hands. All hands. Secure for acceleration. Secure for acceleration. Three minutes. Sound off."

Essa heard the crew beginning to clamber out of their bags, and individual crewmembers began reporting in over the open channel._Navigation secure. Sensors secure. Galley crew secure. _She buckled herself back into the astronomy station. Razia did the same in a seat nearby. She pressed a key on the wrist of her jumpsuit, saying "XO secure."

The automated voice sounded again. "All hands. All hands reporting secure. Countdown to acceleration in five, four…"

The engines kicked in, a hollow roar that shook the bulkheads and seemed to go on forever. She felt the force of the acceleration pulling at her face, her limbs and breasts. Equipment stowed in nearby drawers began to rattle. Essa watched as Commander Razia pulled a ration strip from the shoulder pouch of her uniform and casually chewed it as the burn went on. Five million kilometers and holding steady, Essa thought. A long distance to cover, even in space. When at last the engines stopped the ship grew quiet, unnerving after all the noise. There were a few more pops and bangs from the maneuvering thrusters, then the automated voice signaled the all clear. Essa undid the straps on her seat and let herself drift out into the center of the room. Razia followed her. Over her earpiece, she hear the captain call in, "XO report in for your mission briefing. On the double."

"Yes, ma'am."

Razia pushed her way through the hatch before her then reached out to pull Essa through. "You want to know what we've found?" she said. "Come with me and let's find out."


	2. Chapter 2: In Shepard's Field

Liara was standing at the edge of the meadow in the sunlight. On three sides, mountains, but in front of her, a long view down into the foothills, and the flat plains beyond, quilted with farms. Alpine flowers, tiny things no bigger than a fingernail, were blooming despite the wind racing down the cliffs to the west. She tucked her hands into the pockets of her coat and walked a little way ahead to where a small group of standing stones were arranged, as though guarding the entry.

"Where are we?" Shepard said.

"Earth, this time," Liara said. Shepard was behind her, as always, trailing, as though not wanting to be seen. "We're in Shepard's Field."

"Right," Shepard said.

Liara kept going. Enjoying the spring of grass and dirt beneath her feet. How long had it been since she'd stood on ground where something was growing? Weeks at least. A month sounded more like it. Shipbound, Citadelbound. It all amounted to the same thing. Confinement.

"Coming here is exactly what I needed," she said.

"And this," Shepard said, "is why I think you're sentimental."

Liara smiled, turning, but Shepard had moved away, somehow managing to slip just out of view.

Overhead there was a thin wail of something passing overhead. Looking up, Liara saw a faint contrail, and then a puff of vapor whose appearance as punctuated by a distant bursting sound. Every spring, the Earth passed through a debris field. Astronomers called it the Hammer Field, after the name Admiral Hackett had given the naval operation that had ended the reaper war. The battle had raged for hours, thousands of ships torn apart, leaving behind countless unrecovered dead of every race. Salvage fleets had done what they could, towing the dangerously large hulls and hull fragments to a safe orbits in the asteroid belt, and lining up any destroyed reaper hulks on a collision course with the sun. An uncountable number fragments remained, some of it dangerous. Unexploded munitions, unstable fuel, radioactive materials. And mixed in with that, thousands upon thousands of bodies. All of that high velocity debris had coalesced over the years into a cluster of objects in a predictable orbit around the sun, one that crossed the Earth's path every year, in early May.

"This place isn't just for you," Liara said, finding Shepard, back turned, squatting down to pick flowers. "It's for all the lost and missing. Almost every inhabited planet has one."

"I told you not to let them use me like this," Shepard said. "Make me into a cult or a legend."

"It's just easier to use your name," Liara said. "In the past, families of the dead would come here. They could say their loved ones were here."

"I suppose that's better than the truth." Shepard walked toward the first rank of standings tones, reaching out to touch one. "It's been a long time, Liara. Too long to hold on to a memory."

Liara was quiet for a while. She walked farther out into the meadow. It stretched on for a good distance, perhaps a kilometer or more, until the plateau where they stood dropped sharply away to the valley below.

"Memories aren't just ghosts," she said. She remembered the moment she'd shared with Shepard before the final push, her final moments with the commander, as it turned out. "Not for the asari. They are physical things."

"Touch me, then."

Liara reached out, but then caught herself. "Imagine a book," she said. "I can't touch the people in it, but I'll always know where it is. And if it means enough to me, I'll carry it wherever I go. And so the people in it travel with me. I take them along."

"So I'm a metaphor."

"Better than being a ghost."

Shepard nodded. It did seem a better explanation. "Still, Liara. It's been years."

"Two hundred and seven," she said.

"All the people who came here to mourn their lost—they're long gone, too."

"A war like that leaves wounds even later generations will feel."

"I think it's time to let go," Shepard said. "Of me."

"I would, Shepard. But love doesn't die with the body. Not yours. Not mine."

"At least put me back on the shelf," Shepard said. "Find someone, Liara. That's an order."

"If I remember correctly, I was never officially part of your chain of command." Shepard bristled and Liara laughed and gave a mock salute. "I haven't been lonely," she said, but was it even true? She shook her head, and forced her eyes shut. The image of Shepard disappeared. When she opened her eyes again her only company in the meadow was the sunlight.

There was another group of standing stones toward the center of the meadow, and Liara, beyond all reason, was determined to make it there before the cold drove her back.

As she went light flashed on her wrist and a small holographic screen opened out for her to view.

"Yes?" she said. The person at the other end was an old contact from her Shadow Broker days, a krogan who had done a little wetwork for her here and there. She'd only ever known him as Arclight. It took her a moment to realize she was watching a pre-recorded transmission. He was wearing body armor, but the chestplate looked to have been ripped open by at least one close-range strike. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and orange blood leaked from a gash on his chin.

"Doctor T'Soni," he said. His voice was always a low roar, but now he was shouting over a wall of noise behind him. After a moment, the sound resolved into small arms fire. "You need to see this."

The camera angle changed, and followed Arclight as he moved through a door into a windowless room, where three dead bodies—two asari, one human, all shot through the head—had been dragged and lined up against the wall. She wasn't sure what he was trying to show her.

"Give me some light," he said, then reached down and tore open the uniform of the first one, revealing some kind implanted device, tubes growing through the skin of the chest, winding their way through the ribs.

Arclight stood and looked at the camera. "I don't know what these things are," he said. "We've only seen a few, but I'm betting its something you'll want to know about." After a pause he said, "It's not likely we'll make it out of here. It doesn't matter. I've already dispatched a messenger yesterday with one of these things in a body bag. She'll meet your contact tomorrow at one of the usual spots. Make sure your person isn't late."

There was a terrible ripping sound, and the wall behind Arclight disappeared. Orange flame roared behind him, the image stuttered momentarily, and then through the dust Liara saw a beautiful dawn sky through the opening.

"All right then," Arclight shouted to his remaining troops. "Back to work!" Much more quietly, in a voice that didn't at all sound like him, he looked directly at the camera again, and said, "Good luck, doctor."

The transmission ended. A timestamp indicated that it was already ten hours old. Best to get in touch with her former associate as soon as she could.

#

An hour later, Liara, having descended the path from Shepard's field to the shuttle that would return her to the spaceport, was still wondering to make of Arclight's information. She had broken the footage of the bodies down into still images, though they showed her almost as little as the grainy video. Her first thought was to discard the transmission, board her ship, and find a remote world somewhere beyond the relays, where she could simply disappear and never have to suffer the consequences for having been who she once was.

Liara had long ago put information trading behind her. Once the Illusive Man had found out who she was, how much longer could it take other organizations to connect the dots? Even the broken down communication network, the decades of political uncertainty and social chaos that followed only provided a temporary buffer from those who wanted to harm her. The asari live long lives, but the organizations she'd worked against had long memories. No matter how she might try to insulate herself, in the end there had been nothing to do but expose the network—at least partially—to as many different agencies as she could. Now that it was out in the open, the Shadow Broker's networks had collapsed. Some agents had been killed or imprisoned, others had gone into hiding. Many more had simply gone on with their lives, being too important for simple _disposal_—a word she herself had used to describe having an enemy disappear. Liara was one of those who was too important to kill.

The greatest criminals, she thought, are not the ones who evade capture the longest, but the ones who transcend the law, redefining what was once criminal activity as lawful conduct. That was Doctor Liara T'Soni's penitence, knowing what she'd done and being allowed to live long enough to see the consequences. But she was young, still. She could do some good.

Now she advised the asari delegation to the Citadel Council on matters of state security. They would want to know about these findings.

She looked at the images again, while making notes. _Biomechanical grafting. Nanomolecular implantation. Cerberus activity._ _Reaper technology. _She looked at the list and caught herself. Had she really written these things down? The shuttle banked over the spaceport, and soon she was climbing the ramp to her ship: small, but comfortable, and crewed by people Liara knew she could trust. Her first stop was the cockpit. She found the pilot there, already going through her preflight routine.

"Are we ready, Alera?" Liara said.

"Just give me our destination." Alera's hands hovered over the controls.

"The Citadel. We have business there."


	3. Chapter 3: Mission Briefing

Mission Briefing

Almost the entire crew, save the second mate, and the other flight deck officers, had assembled in the mess by the time Essa and Razia arrived. They hadn't had far to go. Now the captain was braced against the padded ceiling. The screen attached to the bulkhead behind her that usually displayed whatever the observatory's telescope was investigating instead showed readings from cockpit sensor array. Essa saw the same black shape transiting across a field of stars, though the outline of dark had a subtle curve to it now as it appeared to be catching some of Parnitha's light, though still not enough to give her a sense of what it was.

Essa swam through the air to an open space where she would have a good view of the screen. The captain nodded at her, and began.

"During third watch, at approximately zero-three hundred standard time, our sensors detected an unidentified contact drifting somewhat beyond the orbit of Tevura." There was a collective exclamation of surprise from the gathered crew. "At the time, we were on parallel courses, traveling at roughly the same velocity, at a distance of some five million kilometers. The contact is small enough that we may not have detected it at all, had it not been passing more or less directly in front of us." Another wave of noise passed through the mess. "As per our mandate, we executed a seventeen-minute burn with the intent of bringing us level with the contact. We will decelerate appropriately in approximately five hours, at which time we expect to be level with the contact, at a lateral distance of one hundred kilometers." The captain turned to face the screen. "As you can see, the object is not especially large, though its gravitational pull is significant. As you can see, as well, it has almost no albedo." The captain put her hands together and nodded to the chief scientific officer, Dr. Neela T'Lanois. "Doctor."

T'Lanois pushed herself from where she was seated and crossed over to the captain. She was small for an asari, thick through the body and limbs. She and Essa got along, though she seemed to enjoy antagonizing just about everyone else on board. Even she, though, seemed to understand that the commandos meant business, and went about her days apparently pretending they weren't there.

All the same, it was odd, Essa thought, not to see her smile as she settled against the padding and, bracing herself, began to speak. "For those of you who know your local astronomy well enough, you might be thinking that this encounter was not entirely unexpected." Rapt attention from the science team. The commandos, arrayed against the far side of the compartment looked unimpressed. She went on. "For those of you who know your local astronomy, we think that this object may be related to the Tevura anomaly."

T'Lanois flipped the image—and now there it was, a little hint of a grin, she was excited after all—to show a diagram of Tevura's outer ring. Observations showed, she was saying, that the ring had been changing since it was first discovered over two thousand years ago. The first images were drawings made by the land-based astronomers who had first observed the ring structures. These were historical documents, some of them with descriptive notes written in elaborate calligraphy, made at a time when even the most primitive imaging devices existed in only embryonic form. From these drawings T'Lanois moved to more recent photographs and even a few segments of video footage. From the time when the rings had been discovered to present day, she explained, Tevura's rings had, they estimated, lost nearly half of one percent percent of their total mass. "That doesn't seem like much," she said, "But it accounts for nearly forty cubic kilometers of material." She paused to let everyone digest that information, then added, "We have little indication as to where this material has gone."

Roughly every two hundred years, she went on, observers had discovered that this outer ring, the Psi-Ring, appeared to grow a bulge that persisted for a few days, then disappeared, not to reappear. For centuries, scientists had suggested that there was an undiscovered seventh planet, or other celestial body that, on reaching orbital conjunction with Tevura, perturbed the Psi-Ring, stealing a small amount of material from it. Some had even gone so far as to project an orbital path of this object.

"In fact," T'Lanois said, "Their calculations have proven to be extremely accurate. We observed the Tevura anomaly appear four days ago. The object we are seeing now passed between the planet and the _Nixia_ during our last orbital maneuver. Even so, if Lieutenant D'Erinia hadn't aimed our sensors directly at it, we would not have encountered the object at all."

There was a brief round of applause for Essa. Commandant Razia, who had slipped in behind her, clasped her shoulder again, and whispered, "Good work." It was not a friendly gesture, as far as Essa could tell.

T'Lanois continued, "As you might imagine, our investigation of the anomaly is listed among the secondary mission parameters of the astronomy team, and as such we deemed it worthy of deviating from our primary capture mission."

One from the probe-capture crew called out, "What if the probe returns while we are off track?"

Doctor T'Lanois looked at the floor and said, "We expect to be back on station within two days. If we miss the probe, our relief can catch up to it." Protests from the capture team; T'Lanois ignored them.

More questions. While there was noise to cover her words, Essa turned to Razia and said, "Is this why you're here?"

Razia cocked her head and smiled, every gesture a threat. "There you go. You've figured it out."

When T'Lanois had finished, the captain again spoke. "We are currently four hours and twenty-eight minutes from deceleration. We expect rendezvous with our contact imminently afterward. Section heads prepare your teams. Flight deck, please remain. All other hands, dismissed."

#

There was more information once they were in their private group. Essa was pleased to again be in the inner circle. With the rest of the crew gone below, Razia slipped over to the screen. She added three new images, two grainy and indistinct, and one final photograph showing an oblong structure that appeared to have a hole through the middle. Extending away from that opening were two long, arrow straight structures that looked like rails.

Essa had her feet attached to cloth loops in the floor. She said, "It's an artificial structure."

The captain and Razia exchanged a look.

"You knew?" Essa said. When the didn't answer, she went on, "Where did this image come from?"

"Where do you think?" Razia said.

"Nothing's been out this deep into the system."

"Except—"

"Except for the probe itself," Essa said, completing the captain's sentence. "So this image was sent back three years ago?"

Razia nodded. Essa's eyes grew wide. This mission had been in the works for a long time, then. Perhaps the probe wasn't even their main priority. She thought: an alien-made object—proof of alien intelligence—at their doorstep. Then she remembered the military fortifications at High Rock.

How long had they known? And who knew? Why the secrecy?

Razia seemed to sense her curiosity. "You understand this is a high-level mission. Your selection for it was not a coincidence, but don't make us regret picking you over another."

How long had she herself been waiting to find such a thing? She floated closer to the screen and looked at Razia's clearest image of the object again.

"Does anyone know what it is?" she said.

"No," Razia said. "And that's exactly why I'm here."

"Serrice insisted," the captain said. Essa sensed the imposition.

"The military doesn't like unknowns," Razia went on. "And you agree, this is an unknown, yes?"

The captain folded her arms under her breasts. If she agreed, she didn't let on. She, too, had been a young pilot once, having claimed in a more jovial mood, on an earlier expedition, to have dropped bombs and strafed the line of advancing Serrans, during the final months of the war. But again, that had been a long time ago.

Razia spoke. "We think it might be a derelict ship," she said, "But you can seen the dimensions. It's more than fifteen kilometers long."

"A warship, then?" the captain said.

"You don't invest resources like that if you don't plan to defend it. I wouldn't." Razia looked over at Essa, fixing her with her bloodthirsty gaze. "Perhaps its purpose isn't only military, but it's the size of a city. It's valuable to someone. Therefore, we must assume if anyone is on board, they're more than likely hostile."

Essa was quiet. She wondered aloud how long it might have been out there.

"Centuries," the captain said. "The discovery of the Tevura anomaly gives us a timeframe, but it's a rough guess. Likely it's been longer than that. Much longer."

Essa only shook her head. Excitement, terror. Both mixed within her until she couldn't tell one from the other. She wiped her mouth.

Razia said, "We'll approach in the launch. Four of your science crew. Along with them, me and a small team. Armed. You will pilot us in the launch, while the _Nixia _waits at a minimum safe distance of one hundred kilometers."

Something inside Essa seemed to jump. She kept her face still, and said, "And then?"

Razia smiled again, but touched her coil-burn as though it still hurt. "We go inside. See who's stirring, maybe turn on the lights, if we can." She paused, then added, "That's if all goes well."

"And if it doesn't," the Captain said, "The lieutenant will be waiting for you with the engines warm, to make sure you can leave in a hurry if things go wrong."


	4. Chapter 4: Uniform Hotel

Ascending through ten thousand meters the comm channel crackled and an Alliance controller said, "Uniform Hotel one seven seven, hold current vector for traffic."

"Acknowledge, control," Alera said. Her hands remained steady on the controls and the ship kept level. Up ahead a squadron of fighters, five groups of three, flying in tight delta formations, came tearing through the upper atmosphere, their angle of descent sharp, then angling up to reduce their speed. Some seconds later, there was a collective sonic boom, recorded by the ship's external sensors and played back over the comms for Liara and Alera to hear.

"The Seventh Carrier group must be back from patrol," Alera said. "Those are the markings on the fighters anyhow."

Glad she'd decided to remain on the flight deck instead of retreating to her quarters, Liara looked out into the fading evening light. Their path was taking them over Europe. She had never seen Earth before the invasion, but she'd always believed Shepard who had told her how beautiful it once was. Before the invasion, Earth's nightside was a lacework of gold city lights and darkness—oceans, wilderness. Now, the lights from many great population centers were gone: Paris, London, Berlin in particular had been rendered uninhabitable by the invasion. Gray wasteland had replaced green forests. The survivors had found themselves forced to move, and so tiny settlements were appearing here and there in the countryside, none of them bigger than ten or twenty thousand. It would have seemed the countryside couldn't handle such an expansion, until one realized that perhaps as few as one in six humans on Earth had survived the war.

Liara had only known a postwar earth. Earth after London, after Hammer and Anvil, after Shepard disappeared into that beam, never to return. A blast of light from the Citadel put an end to the war. The reapers had stopped their attack. Some of them had seemed to simply give up, let their barriers drop, as though they were allowing themselves to be destroyed. But the full reaper fleet had never been accounted for. Reports of numerous ships of all sizes accelerating to FTL as the battle ended couldn't be discounted. What had become of them was a question that had troubled Liara for two hundred years. There were billions of stars in the galaxy, thousands of inactive relays. They could be anywhere. And now Arclight and these bodies. What to make of those. Goddess, let them not be connected, Liara thought.

#

Liara remembered those years after the war, before the Charon relay had been repaired. In the days after the final battle, if it had indeed been final, the air had been thick with dust and soot. Every day, debris came thundering down from orbit. Most of it hit the ocean, leaving the seas a churning mass of whitecaps. Coastal cities flooded, washed away, were left abandoned.

At noon the sky was dark as a storm cloud, at night it was as black as a grave. Four years of darkness, four years of watching children play in icy mud. Four years of a cold sun that gave no warmth, and nights without stars. When it was clear, the moon appeared as a cold green disk through the ash. Plants vanished from the landscape.

Liara remembered counting the days she was trapped on earth, under the black rain that fell on the shantytown of prefabricated housing where she and some of the other lucky "important" refugees lived. The krogan marines who'd borne the full force of the attack weren't as fortunate, living in holes they'd dug in the rubble of London, worse even than Tuchanka they claimed. Liara had watched them scraping out an existence there. Almost all of the wounded would eventually die of infection. Of the ones that remained, half would join their comrades in the mass grave that had once been Hyde Park.

For the turians things went about the same. And the humans. And the asari. Fighters all, and heavily armed. How they had gone from the largest land army ever assembled to demobilized workforce spoke only to the respect they all bore for Shepard, who had sacrificed as much as they had, but who gave their suffering a public face. Liara had marveled at the turian and asari commandos who lined up docile as sheep every morning outside their camp to help clear rubble. There'd been enough debris to build a series of small mountains across what had once been a great city. In the centuries that had passed, they'd been covered with earth, and overgrown with grass and trees. Now families went there on weekends: Kite Hill, Westminster Hill, Queen's Mount.

#

Four years of waiting before the first ship arrived from beyond the Charon relay, bearing news from the larger galaxy. Beyond the uncountable dead, when one read the reports there was still reason to hope. No planet, no colony had been spared, but many had survived. Everywhere there was talk of rebuilding.

Even so, on earth the landscape was littered with toxic debris. From the cockpit, Liara could see craters dug by four crashed ships. The largest had become a circular lake four kilometers across, called Lac Colmar. Here and there were flickers of light, little towns. The Earth would come back.

Recovery was afoot, as it was everywhere, but Liara, aged three hundred and twelve, saw the tragedy of a short-lived species. The generations after the war had lived their entire lives knowing nothing but scarcity and hardship. And now cities were returning, new metropolises budding on the coast: Brighton and Margate were both home to populations of over a hundred thousand. Too few, Liara thought, were seeing the benefits. Away from the cities people still lived as they had the day after the fighting stopped, in dire need, in makeshift homes. Too few were doing anything about it.

Control spoke again. "Hotel Uniform one seven seven, you are cleared proceed to orbit. Your escape velocity vector is Alpha eight one four. Good night."

"Alpha eight one four, roger," Alera said. She examined her screens, then said, "Seventeen hours, Doctor. Shall I call to have your apartment made ready?"

"No, Alera," Liara said. "Let's keep this as quiet as we can."

"Aye," Alera said. "I'll reset the transponder once we jump to FTL."

Liara nodded, and stood. The ship was climbing past the low orbital stations. Up above, the moon, a waning crescent out ahead of them, was rising. On the surface, there were several visible structures, some ruins, others newly built to replace what had been lost during the invasion.

"I'll be in my cabin," Liara said. "Let me know if you notice anything unusual."

"As always."

#

The ship was narrow and small, a new quarian design that Liara had modified extensively, with bigger drives, and a large array of communication gear, much of which she'd acquired illegally through intermediaries with access to supply chains, mostly in the Turian Heirarchy and the Alliance. It wasn't as stealthy as the _Normandy_, but it was faster, and had better heat and drive-core endurance. The cost was comfort, meaning a slender passageway that linked the cockpit to the other compartments. Everything on the ship was miniscule, built to save space.

In the comms room, she found the other two crewmembers, a human named Karen Drummond, and another asari, Letha D'Anoris, were monitoring communications as nearby as local radio chatter to comm buoys as far away as Omega.

"Nothing, boss," Karen said.

"And were sure no one's following?" Liara said.

"We'll know more once we cross the lunar threshold," Letha said. "I'll page you if we find anything. In the meantime try to sleep."

Liara smiled and pressed on. Beyond this cramped room, the corridor split, upwards to her cabin, and downward to a small washroom, crew quarters, and a library, where Liara kept a collection of rare paper books, written in both asari dialects and in several human languages. She made her way up to her cabin. A screen mounted to the wall showed a series of views outside the ship. One displayed the earth dropping away behind them as the ship accelerated. It would eventually disappear as they crossed the light barrier. The other screens showed nothing but stars.

In the corner of the room was a wall that, when pressed in a certain way, would slide back to reveal a narrow alcove that contained a cache of weapons, a considerable amount of cash in various currencies, and a pedestal that held a quantum entanglement communicator. Technically she wasn't permitted such a device, though she doubted the councilor would allow her to be handed a long prison sentence for possessing one. In any case, the communications were impossible to track, so as long as she and her associates were careful no one need know about it. She pressed a button and after a moment or two a salarian figure appeared through the static and turned to face her.

"You have work for me?"

"On the Presidium. There will be a set of remains delivered at Dock 81 A in about seven hours. Please claim them in the name of the Elara Grace Mortuary and Memorial. You'll be supplied with an appropriate vehicle and uniforms for your team."

"Who will be taking delivery?"

"The mortuary, of course," Liara said.

"Of course." The salarian stepped back, fading deeper into the static that flooded the edges of the image. "Further instructions?"

"Make sure the package stays shut. That's all."


	5. Chapter 5: Away Team

The four commandos were lined up outside the airlock, in their bulky, armored exosuits, and carrying carbine rifles. The youngest one had on breacher gear, carrying the infamous plasma torch. Of all of them, she seemed the most relaxed. The commandant and the captain were holding onto rungs at the mouth to the airlock, having some sort of wordless conversation.

The science team, dressed much the same, their gear in cases, sidearms clipped to their chests above their regulator controls. T'Lanois was helping Essa put on her breather helmet before boarding the launch. She was saying, "Just hold still," as Razia cleared her throat.

The captain spoke first, though she seemed disgusted by what she was about to say. "This is primarily a military operation," she said finally. A hairline scar that only showed itself during moments of intense mental stress appeared on her chin like a misaligned dimple. "That said," she went on, "first contact protocol is in effect. For the past two hours we have been hailing our unknown contact on every frequency. We have received no response. On approach you will attempt to make further contact. The objective is to investigate first. Effecting entry during this operation is a secondary concern."

Razia, behind the faceplate of her helmet looked on, bemused, as though these orders meant nothing. She shifted to face all assembled, "You know what that means. Weapons tight. Regulate. Science team, unless I give the order, if I see any of you with your sidearms drawn, I'll shoot you myself. Clear?"

They were. There was a collective battle cry from the commandos that made the captain jump.

Razia said, "Any questions?"

None.

Essa pulled herself through the throat of the airlock and into the cramped cockpit of the launch. T'Lanois followed her and took the right slot, buckling herself in to the rig that left its occupant in a standing position. Behind them, the commandos and the rest of the science team clipped themselves into their own slots. They were one space short: Razia would have to hook herself to the cargo webbing that covered the back of the crew cabin. Essa was not surprised to see that she appeared more than comfortable with this arrangement.

Thump thump on the hatch: good seal. Then, over the radio, from the captain, "Airlock cleared and sealed. Separation clearance granted."

The launch separated with a jolt, and Essa fired thrusters to maneuver them away from the _Nixia_. Out ahead, Parnitha glowed just above and to the right of the object, a cold and distant little spot of light. She fired the thrusters, two brief accelerations and then began their approach in earnest. T'Lanois monitored the instruments. "Hailing," she said. After a pause, she said, "No response."

The object grew larger. Essa kept steady on the controls, stopped the acceleration and let the launch drift. In the gravitational pull of the object, the launch began to yaw and Essa corrected.

"Hailing again," T'Lanois said. She hovered, bent low over a console covered in buttons and knobs. "Still nothing." After a moment she looked up and said, "Hm!" She studied her panel again, as though to confirm something, then, calmly as she could, "We've been pinged."

Essa relayed the information to the _Nixia_. "Roger that," was the only response. Then, from the captain, "It must be a directional signal. We aren't reading it."

After a moment T'Lanois said, "There it is again. Whatever that thing is, it knows we're here."

"Problems, Lieutenant?" Razia said.

"No," Essa said, though she wondered if that were the truth. "We're going to do one close pass, starside face first, to the far end of the structure."

She rotated the ship to decelerate. In another few minutes they were level with the object, five hundred meters away from it. It was impossible to take in the entire object from this distance. They were at the end closest to the large central opening of the structure, inside of which were two rings that appeared to be moving.

"Searchlights coming online," T'Lanois said.

Essa rotated the launch to better aim the light. A bright circle appeared on the side of the object: its surface wasn't perfectly smooth, as she had thought it might be, but was covered in a layer of dust, that seemed to have accumulated in drifts and dunes. The thing looked like one of the antelopes that roamed the plains to the south of Armali, with its stripes and spots. Underneath the veneer of dust were indentations and what appeared to be viewports.

"We're being pinged again."

"Any other energy sources?"

"Negative. None that I can read here."

Razia pointed at something on the display and said, "What is that?"

Essa stopped the launch's drift and maneuvered the light to the spot Razia indicated. There, cast into strong relief by the light, was the unmistakable shape of a docking ring.

"Another ping," T'Lanois said. "They're getting closer together." She twisted a knob on her panel and said, "Ha. There—listen." Silence at first, then, a soft pip. Essa counted to ten before she heard another.

"We're being pulled closer," she said. "I'll need to maneuver to finish our pass."

Razia's hand appeared on her shoulder again. "No. Bring us in closer."

Essa took her hands off the controls. "Our orders—"

"Your orders come from me," Razia said. "Now, maneuver us in. We'll finish our inspection later."

Essa hesitated, but there again was the commandant's hand on her shoulder. "Do it, lieutenant."

She fired the thrusters and kicked the launch nearer and nearer the dock. The pips began coming closer together. Fifty meters out, Essa braked and the launch slowed to a crawl. Within the mouth of the airlock, she thought she'd seen something move. "Did you see that?" she said.

Razia nodded. She touched a button on her shoulder and said, "Red team, weapons ready. Two minutes."

"What are you doing?" T'Lanois said.

"If it looks like a trap about to be sprung, I guarantee you it is." She pulled her own carbine from its rack on the front of her suit and checked the safeties. "Get us in close, lieutenant. Don't couple, and maintain radio contact."

Essa stopped the launch just beyond the docking ring and signaled to Razia that she was ready to open the hatch. "Standby for decompression."

The air blew out into space, and everything grew quiet, except for the sound of T'Lanois and the other crew breathing over the short-range comms. The force of the escaping atmosphere made the little ship drift, and Essa corrected. Minsicule ice crystals formed in the vacuum within the cabin and glued themselves to Essa's visor. She reached up with a square of special cloth, trying to wipe them clear. The commandos pushed through the hatch, and she and T'Lanois watched them crossing the gap between the launch and the airlock.

The breacher entered first, then two more followed. Then Razia, then the last commando. They moved swiftly, with absolute calm and assurance, as though they did this sort of thing every day. They were scarcely all inside the airlock, when the hatch shut behind them. Immediately their radios went dead.

"Captain," Essa said. "Are you seeing this?"

"Affirmative," the captain said. "Try to raise them."

"I guess she wasn't joking about an ambush," T'Lanois said. She unbuckled herself from her rig and went aft toward the hatch. Essa looked behind her, where the rest of the science team was gathered around, looking out into the circle of light that illuminated the docking ring.

"Can anyone see anything?" Essa said.

"Negative," T'Lanois said. "There's no window in the outer hatch. No obvious controls, no writing either."

"_Nixia_ please advise."

"Standby," came the answer. Essa recognized the Second Mate's voice. "We've just picked up the probe's signal."

"Predictable," T'Lanois said. "And now the _Desinna _and her crew will get all the glory."

Essa laughed, despite herself. "I hope you're joking."

T'Lanois growled over the comm, then shouted, "Lieutenant!" cried T'Lanois. "The outer hatch just opened. Airlock is clear. No window on the interior hatch. I think I see a control panel. I might be able to get to it."

"Standby, doctor. We're drifting."

It had begun so subtly that she hadn't caught it, but now the launch was perceptibly being pulled in toward the object. Essa fired the thrusters again, pulling about twenty meters from the object, and almost immediately there was another, stronger pull that caused the launch to land hard against the faring of the docking ring. A shock passed through the hull and behind her the unsecured crew screamed over the comms.

Essa fired the thrusters again, but the launch didn't move. The impuse was followed by a terrible wrenching sound.

T'Lanois shouted, "Stop! We've been grappled! You'll tear the hull!"

Essa slowly unhooked from her rig and went after T'Lanois. One of the science team—Talira was her name—thought she had struck her head against the interior her helmet. Another was attending to her, though there was little anyone could do. A few droplets of purple blood had stuck to the interior of her faceplate. More came to join them, coalescing into larger beads. Essa watched Talira staring, panicked, at where they were gathering.

Equipment containers had been shaken loose and floated around the cabin. Through the rear viewport, Essa saw isolated fragments of their heat shield slowly drifting away from the launch.

"How badly is she hurt?" Essa said.

T'Lanois shrugged. "There's a pin-hole in the back of her helmet. She might have split open her scalp. Or one of our sidearms may have fired. She was getting out of her rig when we hit. And Arana seems to have broken her arm."

"We're not leaking fuel," Essa said. "At least there's that."

After the collision, the launch now sat steady on the docking mount. Essa saw that the connector had extended out a meter or two to make contact with their hatch, though it wasn't apparent what was holding them fast.

Arana groaned in the back of the cabin, and Talira's helmet was visibly venting air.

"We need to deal with that," T'Lanois said. Essa blinked. The situation demanded action, but to radio the _Nixia, _to report a collision like this could only mean one thing for her: the end of her career as a deck officer.

"Essa," T'Lanois said, more forcefully. It took her somewhat by surprise, because on duty they called each other by their rank. "Essa. We need to do something."

She blinked. Later she would remember the crackling of the radio, of sound ot Talira's labored breathing, of the need to do something, and do it quickly. But at the moment, what she saw was that Neela had a fine pattern of tiny white spots that began beneath her eyes, and curved upward, making a masklike shape that extended across her brows and up the center of her forehead. Essa had never noticed the markings before, perhaps because she and Neela most often saw each other in the dim interior of the ship, but now in the reflected glow of the searchlight, there they were, like silver stones on a streambed. Such markings—referred to as Athame's Diadem—were an uncommon, though natural occurrence. Some famous asari, especially the stars of stage and screen, liked to have their faces made up in that pattern, sometimes using dots of gold, or semiprecious stones. According to legend they appeared on individuals endowed with supernatural powers.

While she stared, Essa saw Neela's mouth working. She was shouting something then she grabbed her and forced her to turn. Droplets of blood now covered almost half of Talira's faceplate. Over the comms, her breathing already sounded shallow and ragged.

Essa bit down and returned to the cockpit. "Pan, pan, pan. _Nixia_, we are declaring an emergency condition."

After a pause the captain said, "State your emergency."

"The launch collided with the docking ring. There's minimal damage, but we have two injured aboard."

"Have you been able to raise the commando team?"

"Negative," Essa thought a moment. Neela had seen what looked like a control panel. And there was an airlock. Such things only mattered when one was trying to maintain a breathable atmosphere. She keyed her radio again and said, "I am requesting permission to board the object."

"Say again, lieutenant."

"I am requesting permission to carry our injured aboard," Essa said, again, feeling now like a child who had overstepped her mother's rules.

"Negative, lieutenant. You are not to interfere with the commando operation."

Neela said something behind her, but a burst of static nearly drowned her out.

"Captain, we—"

The captain cut her off. "I've issued an order, lieutenant. You'd do well to follow it."

Essa keyed her radio again. "Standby, _Nixia._" She turned to face the cabin again. Talira's breathing had a strange rasp to it, and periodically she gagged. Arana moaned again.

Essa said, "I'm going to see what's holding us fast." Neela nodded, and moved over to the hatch to help her through. Talira gagged again and cried out, her voice painfully loud over the comms. Essa moved into the docking tube, folding metal walls that could extend and retract. Someone, or perhaps an automated system within had extended it to meet the launch's hatch. There were no signs of grapples or other mechanical couplings, at least none she could easily release. Moving up the tube, she spotted the panel that Neela had suggested might control the airlock. It was just on the other side of the outer airlock door, and she couldn't quite reach it without crossing into the interior. She pulled herself closer, careful not to fully cross the threshold of the airlock, and took several still images of the panel with a camera mounted in her helmet.

She sent them to Neela, then continued on again. "Do you think you can make any sense of the controls?" she said. Of course, the captain could see what she was looking at, as well.

"If the commandos could, I'm guessing I'll have the door open in short order."

"Right," Essa said. "Get up here. I'm coming down."

Neela disappeared through the hatch. Essa gathered the rest of the team, instructing the two uninjured members to be prepared to move. There was a delay. Over the radio the captain called for an update. "Situation unchanged," Essa said. And as she did, Neela stuck her head through the hatch and gestured for them to follow.

Turning to the crew, Essa said, "Talira goes first. We'll come back for our equipment if we can. Now move. Go."

The two uninjured crew took Talira by her arms and legs and propelled her through the hatch. Arana went next, and Essa followed. Over the radio, she heard the captain shouting to stop at once. Essa ignored her, and she and the other five piled into the airlock and Neela touched one of the holographic buttons on the console and the outer door slid closed. There was no illumination inside the airlock, and for a moment the space felt a terrible jumble of legs and arms in the seconds it took for the inner door to arm and open. Talira flailed and the crewmember who was holding her slipped through the inner door and disappeared. Essa shouted for everyone to move, and the rest of the crew piled through the inner door.

Bodies, limbs, the sensation of falling, shouts of surprise, the sound of their gear clattering together and then a sharp jolt on the back of her head.

A moment later: Light. She saw that first. Streaming from floodlights mounted on pylons high above them. Then Essa felt something odd: weight. The weight of her own body, and with that came the oddly reassuring sensation of her own physical realness, when she returned to Thessia after a long time aboard ship.

She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees. There was the sound of her hands and knees scuffing against the floor. There was an atmosphere. She wondered if it was breathable. Gravity. Air. Looking up again, she saw the decks of the object were horizontal, like in a building or on a surface ship. A space station that made its own gravity without rotation.

Asari scientists had been working on this problem for better than a century, with very poor results thus far. The most modern version required a user to wear a set of sensors, and a belt filled with almost a kilogram of a mineral salt common to Thessia, which, when exposed to an electric current could take on an exponential amount of mass, or shed it almost entirely. The properties of the mineral were well known, and had been for generations, though the implications of being able to gain or shed mass were only now becoming important, in space flight, in power generation, in the weapons they now carried strapped to their suits. The gravitic simulator worked on a similar principle, by creating small gravitational field between the user and the floor. Or at least it did about half the time. The rest, well—sometimes the user ended up with broken bones.

Essa got to her feet. A step to her right confirmed that something was pulling at her, but how it functioned was beyond her.

Looking over at Talira, she saw that the blood that had gathered on the faceplate of her helmet had run downward, collecting in the padding by her neck. Thick streams of blood and mucus ran from her nostrils. She must have inhaled some of the droplets while still aboard the launch. There was a long gash in her cheek.

"What do you think?" Neela said.

"Any way to analyze the atmosphere?"

"Aside from taking off your helmet?" Neela said. "No."

Essa nodded. She grabbed her helmet and gave it a twist, unlocking the seals around her neck, and pulling it free. She breathed in. The air was cold, and when she breathed out, a long trail of vapor exited her mouth. Neela watched her carefully.

"You're not changing color. You're not gasping. That's good."

"It's cold, and a bit thin, like mountain air. No dodgy smells."

The other crewmembers were already disengaging their helmets, too. After a moment, Neela gave up and followed suit. She knelt down by Talira. A bullet, one of the new projectiles that was barely larger than a grain of sand, had pierced her helmet, and a fragment of it had penetrated her neck, leaving a ragged, ugly exit wound above her lower jaw. Somehow it seemed to have missed all the major blood vessels and her spine. Neela pulled out her first aid pouch and began packing the wounds with clotting wool. "You mustn't try to talk," she said, closing the wounds with flesh glue and spray bandages. As she worked Talira struggled, thrashed her arms and eventually passed out. Neela looked at the pool of blood on the floor, then up at Essa. "I think she's going to be all right. She'll have a bad scar though."

"We need to find the commandos." Essa said. She tried the radio, using their familiar call sign, but received no response. She wanted to say, _We need to get out of here. _She looked around the area. They were in a broad tunnel that looked like it had been designed as a thoroughfare for rolling freight. Down the way, perhaps as far as a kilometer distant, were several indentations in the interior bulkhead that appeared to lead to other parts of the installation.

Neela was sorting through the remaining first aid pouches. She set Talira's wrist tool to display her vital signs. Handing over a syringe to the other two scientists, she said, "If any of these numbers begin to crash, inject her with this, right there." She indicated the spot with her index finger, "and radio immediately."

Essa told them, "It would be best to send two teams in opposite directions, but someone needs to stay with the injured, and I'm not going to ask you to go out alone. Stay here. Radio if the commandos return."

"Aye, lieutenant."

Essa and Neela checked their own sidearms and began moving foreward across the deck. "We'll take the next opening we find." Neela gave a nod, then stooped to examine something on the floor.

"Hold on, look at this," Neela said. "What do you make of these markings?"

She panned her light across the ground so Essa could see. When the light struck certain sections of the floor, a set of arrows appeared.

"The commandos are marking their route," Essa said after a moment.

"So we follow them?"

Essa nodded. It was the only thing to do.

"Do you have any idea where we're going?" Neela asked.

Essa didn't, but said only, "Someone, or something had to know we were here," she said. "It pinged us, it turned on the lights for us. It stands to reason that there's got to be a control panel with a switch that will unhook us from the docking tube."

Neela made a sound in agreement. In this light the Diadem markings on her face were particularly prominent.

They went down the corridor, carefully, for what felt like a long time. Occasionally they found old—alien—markings stenciled on the bulkheads and floors, but nothing they could make sense of. Neela photographed them. "You never know," she said.

The other crewmembers radioed a few minutes later to say that Talira seemed to be stabilizing, though they'd had to redress her wounds. She was resting now, but no longer unconscious.

"Reassuring, I suppose," Neela said. Essa shrugged. She pointed to one of the commando's markings on the floor that in turn directed them to a large opening that led toward the interior. Neela followed her through. They were in a broad tunnel, poorly lit. They couldn't see the other end.

"Nothing could possibly go wrong in here," Neela said. Essa pressed on and pointed to another one of the commando's markings. They seemed to be spaced about fifty meters apart. They walked that far, and not finding another marking doubled back to see if there was a passageway they had somehow missed. There wasn't, so they continued on their way

"I think I've seen this movie," Neela said. "It all starts to go wrong when someone says, 'Don't go in there.'"

"Maybe they stopped marking when they realized there was no way to get lost in here."

"I'm sure that's it," Neela said. "An advanced race of unknown beings. All of them gone. A team of highly trained asari commandos, armed, biotic, they all just abandon their own protocol and then vanish, too. Yeah, sure."

"You think this whole was built for us to supply food?"

Neela shrugged.

"I think you're overestimating our nutritional value."

"I'm only saying—why are we sticking to the floor? How is that happening? Why aren't we bouncing off the walls like on the _Nixia_?"

Essa put up her hands. She had no answers.

"Nothing about this seems right."

The end of the tunnel had come into view. Out ahead of them, what appeared to be cables lay sprawled over the ground. Walking ahead, Essa thought she saw something moving and her hand tightened around the grip of her pistol.

Neela had drawn her weapon, too. "This is the part," she said, "Where I say 'Don't go in there,' and you go anyway. And then I get eaten."

"Something's moving up ahead."

Neela rolled and threw herself against the far wall, where there was a little cover, and peered out. "What do you see?"

Essa walked forward a few more steps. At first she thought it was light falling through a grating, but it continued to move. The pattern was irregular, but not like something poking its head out to get a better look at her. It might have been alive, but she felt a warm breeze blowing.

Essa lowered her weapon and clipped back in place. By then she had reached the end of the tunnel. She stepped forward and gestured again for Neela to follow.

"It's all right," Essa said. "It's just leaves moving in the wind."

"What?" Neela did not put away her weapon, but held it, muzzle pointed at the floor, as she approached the spot where Essa was standing.

The two of them exited the hallway and stepped out into a garden that stretched out in both directions, not in front of them and behind, but up and away, underneath a narrow transparent dome that followed the same curve. Thin clouds of fog passed overhead, at treetop level. Above them, in front of them, wheeled the two massive rings they had seen earlier, turning slowly in the dark of space. And in the middle of the rings, perhaps held there by their motion, was a bright blue light that bathed them and the trees in its warmth, as bright as a miniature star.


	6. Chapter 6: Anatomy

There was no indication that they'd been followed out of Sol. Possibly no one cared where she was going. More likely, they already knew her destination. Liara tried to relax as they passed through the secondary relay in the Annos Basin. It was an odd way to get to the Citadel, but necessary since the end of the war. The faster primary that connected the Exodus Cluster to Widow had been damaged. Subsequent repairs had left it unreliable. After several ships had failed to turn up at the Widow relay, the authorities had closed the linkage indefinitely. Liara didn't mind the extra hours added on to her journey. It gave her time to prepare, time to wonder about what Arclight had sent her, and time to lay on her bed and examine the ceiling, to dream of sleeping, if sleep itself wouldn't come.

At seven the next morning, she was bathed and dressed, and riding in a car piloted by Alera toward one of the taller structures on Tayseri Ward, home to Elara Grace Mortuary and Memorial, a small, privately owned funeral home that serviced the large asari and salarian communities, who were losing their offspring in droves in the Traverse, largely thanks to the lure of mercenary work. Nothing, it seemed, ever changed.

Alera maneuvered toward the skyscraper, lighting on a platform at the top of the structure, where several private garages were ranged against the building's spinward face. When the bay doors had shut behind them, Alera raised the canopy and they stepped out. Liara immediately went downstairs to the reception level, where a young salarian named Eldrin was waiting for her with a datapad in a leather cover in his three-fingered hand.

"Doctor," he said. "Everything has gone smoothly with your arrival, I trust?"

"It has," Liara said. "How are the arrangements proceeding for Matriarch Tilaria's niece?"

"A tragic occurrence," Eldrin said, his voice serene and quiet. "So many of your young, throwing their lives away in the colonies."

Liara was quiet. A few simple lines of code, but couched in too much truth. After the invasion, things had turned quickly again to conflict. Money chasing money. Corporation fighting corporation. Especially in the Traverse and Terminus systems, where the Council had no influence at all any more. Old mercenary bands, Eclipse, Blue Suns, Blood Pack, Talon Company, all but wiped out in the invasion had largely been replaced by new operations that provided the same services and charged the same rates. New names, same old story. The young chasing fortune and glory, their elders counting profits and writing off the dead as a business expense.

Mercenary work thrived on desperation, and there was plenty of that to go around. The asari born after the invasion had grown up restless and poor, never a good combination. And, Liara thought, just because an asari could live more than a thousand years, it didn't mean that she _would_. How many, she wondered survived that long? Perhaps one in a hundred. One in a thousand. Not many.

Not that anyone on the Citadel would pretend to notice the losses. And here, in the mortuary, the footpaths marking the polished stone floors, the tasteful flowers and abstract sculpture, the running water, each a sign of time slipping away from us all, covered over that sad truth with a veneer of false serenity. Liara almost hated herself for purchasing the business, one of the many fronts she'd established before laying bare her networks.

It did have one advantage, though. Three floors down, on a windowless level, behind a series of security doors, was a lab, where Liara now found the package Arclight had sent her. Eldrin led her into the lab, and dropping the quiet, calm demeanor of a mortuary attendant, he directed her to where a human wearing a surgeon's uniform stood beside a tray of surgical tools. Behind him was what Arclight had sent: an oblong box, sturdy and heavy, with a series of controls to manage its internal refrigeration system. The lid was shut, with security tape over the closures.

"No one has touched it?" Liara said.

"It's been under my observation since it arrived," the human said. He was small for a male, both skinny and short. Doctor Alex Mason was a surgeon at Huerta Memorial, but Liara had hired him for special work, almost twenty years ago, and he had proven to be reliable, and very, very discreet.

"And our friend?" she said, meaning Arclight.

Eldrin shook his head. "I'm afraid the only survivor from his team was the messenger he sent along with this—" and gestured at the box.

"Where were they?"

"Pirin," Eldrin said. "A new human colony."

"I've heard of it," Liara cut in. "From what I understand, it's mostly water. And none too warm."

"There are dozens of islands," Eldrin said. "Some of them are quite large."

Liara knelt down and put a hand to the box. It was quite cold. "Do we know what he was doing there?"

"He and his team had been hired to do security for a group of visiting diplomats. They'd gone to mediate a dispute over land ownership in one of the larger archipelagos. There's been a good deal of unrest there, between ownership and labor."

"It would seem so," Liara said. She looked at Mason. "Any idea what we have?"

"Only one way to find out," Mason said. "Let's get started."

"This is all very exciting," Eldrin said. His hands were balled into fists. "A new specimen for study. We haven't had one this interesting in a while, from I understand. Reaper tech, isn't it?"

"No one said that, kid," said Mason.

"Be careful what you wish for, Eldrin," said Liara.

"And put on your gear. Who knows what you might catch from this thing."

"Right, right." Eldrin said. He and Mason went into an alcove behind the slab table, where they donned pressurized suits, breather helmets and heavy boots. Returning to the lab, they connected their suits to hoses that would provide them fresh air while they worked.

"Doctor T'Soni," Mason said. "It's probably best if you observe from outside."

Liara nodded. She returned to the door and stepped out. Nearby was a darkened room the size of a large closet, where half a dozen monitors showed the operating theater from every possible angle. The lab itself was built inside a capsule that hung on cables. If anything should go wrong—not that she expected it to—it could be flushed with plasma, killing everything within. And in case that didn't do the trick, the cables could be cut, and the entire lab ejected into space.

Sitting down, Liara locked them in—they would be there for the duration—and spoke into a microphone, saying, "I'm ready. Let's begin."

The first part was always the same. Mason cut open the seals and raised the lid.

"Looks like your friend did this properly," he said as he and Eldrin lifted the body bag out of the casket. "Kept it cold, pumped the case full of argon to stop decomposition. Good. Good."

They noted the information marked on the bag, date, species, and location of collection of the sample. They weighed it, then sliced open the bag top to bottom. Inside was an asari, her age uncertain, at least until they could dissect her brain. She wasn't too tall, and had a pale vertical line marking her chin. The front of her uniform was torn open, and soaked in purple blood. There were multiple gunshot wounds to her body, three in the chest, and one more in the head. Part of the cranium was blown away. She was still wearing a uniform that identified her as a resident of the predominantly human colony, Pirin. Before her death, she'd been a mechanic who worked in the agricultural sector of Arras the settlement where the unrest had begun.

"Looks like we have something here under the uniform," Mason said. He peeled back the outer layer, showing the wounds, and the implanted material. He and Eldrin cut off the rest of the uniform and began their dissection. Liara watched in the cameras as Mason detailed the wounds. "This one here isn't fatal. Messy thought. Small entry wound over the right hip, hit the bone and exploded out through her lower back. Medical attention would have saved her, but probably it hurt enough to immobilize her. Firefight ends, and along comes your friend. Double-tap to the chest puts her down for good." He paused. "Not a very humane thing to do, executing the wounded."

"Arclight was efficient," Liara said, "but he was not what I would consider merciful." She studied the screens and thought for a moment. Then she, "The shot to the head, then, was it post-mortem?"

"Looks like it," Mason said. "And it appears to have happened much later." Eldrin lifted the asari's head so Liara could see. "See how the blood's coagulated inside the skull? I'm guessing she'd been dead for several hours."

"Making sure?" Eldrin said.

"Of what, though?" Liara said. "His message to me contained evidence of at least three more bodies given similar treatment."

Two hundred years ago she'd have known. Now reapers were old news, and she hoped they were going to stay that way. On the Citadel, the main concerns remained economic growth at all costs. Hence their secondary concern of stemming the new Krogan expansion near the borders of salarian and asari space, the inscrutable geth, the lurking rachni. Many promises had been made during the war; the council had held up most of their bargains, but not all. Dozens of other threats remained just beneath the surface, keeping the Spectres busy. If anyone mentioned reapers, it was largely a matter of old history, or at the very most, debris fields like the one around earth that periodically troubled local starship traffic.

The autopsy went on for several more hours. They removed her brain, weighed it, then dissected several key pieces to determine her age, which Mason put at roughly six hundred years. "She might have been older, but with the damage the bullet did, that's as close as I can estimate."

Next they opened the thorax and removed the implanted devices growing through her body. The device was considerably larger than Liara would have thought, having displaced, even crushed, several of her major organs.

"It doesn't seem like she would have gone on living much longer like this," Mason said. "She had an internal bleed right here. There's a big clot forming. Would have killed her eventually, maybe in as little as a few days."

"Not as quickly as the bullets," Eldrin said.

They had to roll her over to remove the implanted device. Part of it consisted of a wire-like structure that entered her spine and traveled up the column into her brain. Eldrin took the device away to a separate part of the lab and began running tests on it. Mason looked up into the cameras at Liara. He looked troubled: his aging face was pale behind the faceplate of his helmet, and covered in sweat.

"I don't like this at all, Doctor," he said.

"Nor do I." Liara stood up and paced the observation room. "This has all the stink of indoctrination on it. But it's not the same."

"If you say so. Some of the structures look pretty similar to the husks you described from the war."

Liara agreed, but was interrupted by Eldrin shouting, "Doctors!" He was calling to them from his station at the other end of the lab. Liara changed cameras so she could see. "Have a look at this."

He switched to a microscopic view of the implanted material. Liara gasped at what she was seeing: cell walls, organelles, layers of tissue. Within the tissue, something that looked like mites were moving, burrowing, forming new structures. Living creatures, tearing up original structures and forming new ones.

"This isn't an implant," Eldrin said.

"No," Liara said. She zoomed in to get a better look. "It's an infection."

Eldrin had isolated some of the mites.

"They're no larger than a cell themselves," Liara said. "How can they function at such a small scale?"

Eldrin was studying a readout at his work station. "They appear to have analogues of gross musculature, and insectoid mouth parts. It doesn't appear that they're feeding, thus individuals won't live very long. It seems they're breeding out of her cells. Not all of them have ceased functioning yet, thanks to refrigeration. They're actually using her own genetic material to reproduce. These mites appear to be specific to her."

"Well, I suppose that is good news," Liara said.

"I didn't say they couldn't adapt," Eldrin said, a bit too sharply. He turned again to his screens.

"So it's a parasite," Liara said. "What are they doing to her?"

Eldrin didn't answer.

"Making more," Mason said. "I gather."

"No," Eldrin cut in. "Not just that," he said. "The dendrite into her brain says otherwise. It was exacting some kind of control over her."

"Eldrin," Liara said, "Compare it to samples from the Thorian. I made sure to obtain Exogeni's data over the years."

"Yes, yes, yes," Eldrin said, though it wasn't clear why. "Not that. I suppose they work by similar means, but it's not the same organism. We would need to—test—these on living tissue to see what they're really for."

"Doesn't make any sense, though," Mason said after he'd let Eldrin work a while longer. "The thing was killing her. It had caused a bleed around her pericardial sac. No one lives through that for long. Most parasites want to keep their host alive, at least for a while."

"Unless," Eldrin said, "this infestation was merely a transitional stage between a reservoir of dormant pathogens and its actual host."

"So she was a breeding ground then," Liara said.

"If you look at these sacs here," Eldrin said, highlighting several areas on his screen, "You can see that other things are growing. Perhaps just like the mites, only somewhat larger. I think we can only guess as to the purpose of the dendrite in the brain."

"Where was she from?" Mason said. Liara glanced at the map of the colony where she'd been found. Arclight had marked the positions he and his team were defending at the time, a choke point that controlled access to the port and harbor complex that traded with about a dozen of the other, larger islands. They'd been overrun two days ago. Likely those infected had boarded ships to other parts of the archipelago. The nearest space port, Liara saw, was thankfully about a week's journey by boat. Apparently Arclight, when he'd learned what was happening, had gone ahead and destroyed most of the flying vehicles on the island. Apparently they'd been trying to do the same with the ships, but hadn't quite finished when the battle had reached Arras.

Liara gasped and said, "It appears that she and her comrades were trying to get off the island. Perhaps to one of the larger cities."

"That explains a good deal," Eldrin said. "Infect more, increase your coverage. So the dendrite causes them to—migrate—I suppose you'd say. And yet she and her comrades were in an upland area to begin, weren't they?"

Liara sighed, relieved, momentarily. It wouldn't have been the first time a parasitic infestation would have caused this sort of unrest. She thought of the people of Zhu's Hope on Feros. The Thorian may have been the only one of its kind on the planet—though perhaps even that was unlikely—and it certainly wasn't the only one in the galaxy. Its spores could have been carried on ships from one end of the galaxy to the other. Likely these mites didn't originate on Pirin. Or if they did, chances were, they'd turn up again.

Only two things were important: the first being that these parasites appeared to have something to do with all the political unrest, or at the very least they were causing the unrest to spill over into violence. And second, that it wasn't reaper technology.

Into the microphone Liara said, "Eldrin, make certain you keep samples. I'll inform the council of the infestation. These people need treatment, and perhaps relocation. The Alliance will want to make sure to quarantine the island so that the infestation doesn't spread, and stop any ships that may have been boarded during the fighting."

"Samples," Eldrin said. "I'd like to preserve this organism—alive."

"No," Liara said. "Dead tissue only, in containment. All other materials must be destroyed." Eldrin began to protest, but Liara cut him off, "We will share our data with the Council and the Alliance. There's nothing more we can do."

Eldrin began to speak again, but Liara stopped him. "There's no reaper involvement," she said. "As I had hoped. See to it that this woman receives the proper rituals. Her tag marks her as a practitioner of Siari. Their preferred method is cremation."

"But, Doctor," Eldrin said.

"That will be all, Eldrin," Liara said, and rose from her chair. She'd been in that little room for far too long. She had Alera fly her to the Presidium, where the new asari councilor kept her waiting a good twenty minutes. Matriarch Deniri had been appointed only two years prior, and seemed to want to her importance to Liara.

"The humans will want to know about this," Matriarch Deniri said.

"I have already forwarded our results on to the Alliance, through the appropriate channels."

"And you assure me you've no involvement with the unrest?"

"Councilor, my reach was never that great," Liara said, pretending to be offended. "Arclight was an old associate. A _former _associate at that."

"All the same," Deniri said, "He came to you with his information."

"He survived the invasion, as you and I did. And I'm happy to say his vigilance was much appreciated, both then, as it is now. Alas his mission failed, and I fear what that means."

Deniri nodded. "And these individuals have no access to off world transport?"

"Not yet," Liara said. "Though I recommend swift action to make certain things stay that way."

Deniri nodded, and opened her omnitool. "I'll convene the council. Officially this will be an Alliance matter, and we shall allow them to handle it as they see fit, though we will step in if we need to." Liara nodded and had risen to leave.

Deniri stopped her with a word. "In the meantime," she said. "I have further use for you here, on Zakera Ward."

Liara stopped and turned to face Deniri. "Yes?"

"It appears that something of your mother's has turned up, buried in the foundations of a structure that was recently torn down."

"Buried, you say?"

"Yes," Deniri said, turning away to face the windows of her office. "You were always good at digging, weren't you?"


	7. Chapter 7: Garden and Star

Wind, Essa thought. Altogether, she had spent more than a decade in space, much of it well beyond the orbitals around Thessia. Often months at a time, crammed into a too small ship with too large a crew. Tight quarters never bothered her, or the dehydrated food, or the uncomfortable and noisy sleeping arrangements. She had always been able to get along with almost anyone. She didn't miss the pull of gravity or the comfort of solid ground beneath her feet. What she missed, the first thing she wanted to feel when returning planetside was weather: wind, rain, sunlight. And here it was, blowing ancient leaves along the dead ground.

Twilight from the little star fell over them as they went deeper into the dead garden. The light made it feel warmer, but it was still cold. All the plants had been dead for a long time, and the leaves crumbled into dust when she touched them.

Neela, after a moment of stunned silence, had strayed off on her own. Already the lamps from her suit were shining between the trees, fifty meters away. Over the comm, she said, "Do you recognize these trees?"

Essa wasn't sure.

"You should," Neela said. "Splitleaf, trifolia, northern spike pine."

Essa shined her lights upward, into the branches. She'd studied botany at university, but she didn't see anything familiar now. She'd always preferred engineering. "I don't know plant species."

"You understand what I'm saying, don't you? These are all from Thessia."

"I suppose it only makes sense," Essa said.

"No, you're not understanding me," Neela said. "The northern spike pine has been extinct for—I don't know how long. Perhaps more than fifty thousand years. Sometime during the Third Migration, when the tribes expanding northward needed fuel to survive over winter. They were wiped out. The forests came back, but not the pine. We've only ever found specimens that sunk into deep, oxygen poor fresh water. Or in the fossil record. It's been gone for millennia, at least. Probably much longer."

Essa had almost reached Neela, but found herself obliged to crawl over a mound of interlaced roots nearly as tall as she was. Breathing hard, she tumbled down to where Neela stood, examining clumps of ferns, their leaves disintegrating at her touch. Neela began taking pictures. "We've got to preserve this," she said. "They're going to finally have to give me tenure at Serrice when they see these pictures. If we make it back, I should say." After a pause she added, "Where do you think the commandos went?"

Essa made a sound at the back of her throat, not wanting to think about it. The bigger problem, as far as she was concerned, was that the ground curved up and away from them in the distance, eventually arching up overhead. The gravity seemed to be holding things to the floor, no matter which way the floor was pointing, but she was having trouble making sense of it all. The commandos could have gone anywhere, and unless they started answering her calls over the radio, in an installation this size, it seemed unlikely they would find them. Not before hunger and thirst, or exposure took them.

Neela was moving again, and Essa followed her.

"This was a footpath," Neela said. She traced a groove cut into the ground by thousands of moving feet.

"Meaning what? Animals?"

"No," Neela said with a laugh, "I think this place was a garden."

"Why not, I suppose."

They kept going. There was no sign of the commandos, but every so often, Neela muttered something about extinct species of trees. Before long, they reached a stream. Arching over it was a narrow bridge with no railings. Here Neela stopped and bent low over the bank of the stream.

"Look at this," she said. She was snapping pictures in the mud. "That's a footprint."

"Razia and her band?" Essa said.

"Not unless they all have two toes."

Essa let out an exclamation. "I suppose nothing should surprise us, after everything that's happened."

"See, something barefoot came across the stream here." Neela pointed to a very faint outline. Pulling something from her belt, she sprayed foam into the print, whose outlines Essa could scarcely see. After a moment she pried it clear and held it up. "See? Only two toes. It's been here for a long time. No wind or rain to rub it out." She slipped the lump of foam into her bag of gear then continued on, plunging into the water that reached almost to her waist. At the edges of the current, slushy ice bobbed among the stones and stuck to the mud of the bank. Neela moved carefully, and called back for Essa to come after her. "Don't fall down," she advised. "If you do, your suit will fill up with icy water and you'll drown in less than a minute. I won't be able to help you."

She found more prints on the opposite bank. "Same individual, I think."

"And they're not still here?"

Neela shook her head. "I don't think we'll find anything living. Might be nice to find a skeleton."

"Then we need to keep looking for the commandos."

They walked for a good distance, following the upward slope of the garden, and searching among the clusters of trees and brambles and rocky outcroppings for another exit.

For some distance they found none, and so they walked up the long upward slope of the garden, until they had reached roughly the midway point between the two arms. The little blue star still hung suspended directly over their heads, and the place where they had entered receded into the distance, and the chilly fog that swirled through the treetops that bordered the stream hung in a layer below them. Out ahead, more of the same territory awaited. Clusters of trees, long overgrown, and dead. Clearings full of tall grasses and ferns, most of them familiar from Thessia, that sometimes disintegrated when touched. They were alone, but for each other, and for the dead trees, and the ghostly presence of a long dead alien race, suggested by the occasional footpath, or bridge, or broken stone bench stationed at the edge of an outlook.

At length, Essa said, "Who do you think lived here?"

Neela didn't answer, but only stopped to photograph a few more trees.

"All the way out here at the edge of the system," Essa said. "All the technology in the world, it seems. Here we are sticking to the floor. We were stuck to the floor all the way back down there. But the floor was pointing in a different direction back there. Why put something this big this far away from the only habitable planet. After all, it seems like whoever they were, they were more or less like us. They needed oxygen and light, and—whatever this is."

Neela made a sound, but again didn't answer. A fallen tree blocked their way, and the two spent a good five minutes getting around it. On the other side of the massive stump was something that looked like a park bench, made of polished stone. The bench was situated at an overlook, and Neela took a moment to sit down. "I'm tired," she said. Essa took a seat beside her. They had, she saw now, been climbing the slope of relatively tall a hill. They were above the layer of fog. Stands of tall trees and other hilltops rose up through the haze that shimmered silver in the low light. Essa let out a gasp as a cold gust of wind blew a cloud over their vantage.

"It's beautiful, don't you think?"

Neela agreed. "I wonder, too. All this effort, for what? Anyone that could have built this—we're lucky they meant us well. Or that we were so insignificant it seemed pointless to destroy us."

Essa got up to turn out of the wind. "And they did come to Thessia. I wonder what they thought of us when the arrived."

Neela shrugged. "Not enough to make an impression in the historical record, I suppose." She looked up at Essa. The markings on her face seemed to glimmer in the light from the star.

"I never noticed before," Essa said, "that you had the Diadem."

Neela seemed to blush. "Not many do. It's very faint, except in certain light." She got up and stretched. "We should keep going." And after they'd walked for a while, she said, "I'm glad you saw. My birthmarks, I mean. Not many people see them for what they are." She reached out and gave Essa's hand an affectionate squeeze.

After about an hour they found a rock outcrop that concealed an opening that lead back into the station. Within they found a similar corridor where they left muddy footprints, and where after having traveled some distance they discovered a passageway leading to a series of rooms that appeared to have been living quarters. They hadn't seen a sign of the commandos since the long tunnel they'd entered earlier.

"We'll never find them," Neela said. "Not like this."

There was another room, a mess hall, perhaps, spotlessly clean and orderly, with tables and chairs made for creatures roughly the same size as an asari. Essa realized she was hungry, but decided to save the rations she kept stored in her utility belt for later.

Up ahead they found a junction in the corridors where paths branched away in five directions. There was something that appeared as though it might have been a utility vehicle parked at the intersection, and Essa looked it over while Neela studied the markings designating the different pathways.

"Will it run?" she said.

Essa pushed a few buttons, but the machine, whatever it was meant to do, didn't respond. "I don't think so," and then, touching one more switch, the vehicle lifted up off the ground and hovered at ankle height above the floor.

Neela looked at Essa and shook her head. "I suppose nothing is every going to surprise me again."

A few minutes more and Essa had figured out more or less how to make the thing go. It was hard to control, slipping and sliding in every direction like a wheeled vehicle on ice. She and Neela climbed aboard. Neela indicated a direction, and they moved off down the corridor, slowly at first, then at greater speed. In short order they reached a set of doors that did not open when they approached. Neela studied it for a moment and pressed her fingers to a square panel in the middle. The two halves of the opening slid apart and they walked into a dimly lit room.

Glass screens partitioned off an inner area. The screens began to light up as they approached, and in the center of the room, a holographic projection appeared and slowly came into focus. Essa stood and stared. There at the center of the display was Parnitha, and surrounding that, the six planets, each in their position relative to it. Essa didn't have to study the display for long to realize that it was a real-time image. At the outermost edge of the display was a smaller shape, not to scale, of the installation they'd entered a few hours ago. A small orange pip indicated the _Nixia_, which Essa now saw had moved a considerable distance away from the installation.

"They've gone to recover the probe," she said. And as she said it, another small orange dot appeared at the outermost edge of the display. "That must be the probe itself."

"They'll come back for us, won't they?" Neela said.

Essa affirmed that they would. She looked more closely, then, reached into the display, wanting to touch one of the objects it contained. Her fingers seemed to close around Thessia, and as they did, she felt something solid in her hand. She pulled it to her, and as she did the image of the planet got bigger and bigger, until it began to show the locations of some of the larger orbital stations surrounding her home planet. There were dots everywhere now, Essa saw, other ships moving around the system: the regular traffic between Thessia and High Rock was marked by a line of ships following the weeks long route that connected their homeworld to the installation. There was a supply ship returning from one of the orbital stations around Athame. Dozens up dozens swarmed low orbit around Thessia itself.

"This installation knows everything about is," she said with a gasp.

Neela was standing beside her. "I wonder how much high command knows about _it_," she said.

The screens that surrounded the central display came alive, and beneath their feet, Essa felt something begin to hum, a low rumble that traveled through the floor and resonated up through feet and legs.

"I think we woke it up," Neela said.

"Do you see that?" Essa said. Another small dot—larger than the _Nixia—_had appeared near the edge of Tevura's outermost ring and was heading in the general direction of where they now were.

Neela squinted. She needed visual correction, Essa thought, but perhaps was reluctant to resort to surgery. Aboard ship, she sometimes saw her wearing spectacles to read. "What is it?" she asked.

"Maybe it's an asteroid that's been ejected from orbit, or pulled off track."

"We're a bit far out for asteroids that large," Neela said. "A comet, then? No, a comet would have probably broken up, so close in to the planet."

They studied the display some more. Essa began experimenting with the interface a bit more and soon had figured out how to move from one vantage point to another. Focusing in on High Rock, she pointed at a dozen small dots. "The blips all represent spacecraft," she said. "The planets are all considerably more detailed. There's even a display of local weather patterns on Thessia. And here, you can even see the space elevators."

They looked closely at more of the asteroids, many of which were fully detailed, their cratering and rugged shapes represented accurately when they zoomed in close.

The dot, meanwhile, continued to separate from Tevura's Psi ring, increasing its distance, apparently accelerating. The _Nixia_, meanwhile, continued on its path, drawing closer to the probe, and moving away from the installation.

"I wonder if they've detected _that_," Essa said, pointing at the dot again.

"We should probably get back to the launch," Neela said. For some reason she sounded frightened.

Behind her the board lit up, displaying a picture of the installation. Lines of something—important data, but written in an undecipherable language appeared beside the image. Essa went over to it as several sections of the diagram lit up, showing either red or green. Thousands of characters, grouped into what Essa knew were either numbers or words, or more likely both, appeared in a box on the screen to her right, and a faint pipping sound accompanied them.

Neela went over to that display and began comparing what she was reading to some of the images on her wrist tool.

"We need to get out of here," she said. "That thing seems to be headed directly for us."

"How soon until it arrives?"

Neela studied the console again, and again looked at her wrist tool. "No way to be sure." She pointed to a row of characters on the board that appeared to be constantly changing. "I think these are numbers, and they're getting smaller. At the rate they're going I'd say we have two hours, maybe less." After a moment, she said, "Look at this though." She touched something on the screen, and Essa heard not one but two sounds. A steady pip-pip-pip came from the console. Added to that a low growl that appeared to be coming from the object that was approaching them. "It sounds like they're communicating," Neela said. She tapped a button on her wrist tool and captured a portion of the signal for analysis.

Essa thought about how long it had taken the _Nixia _to draw near to the object where she now found herself and the rate at which this new contact was approaching. "All right," she said. "Let's go."

#

The door slid open, and Essa found herself staring into the barrel of a gun. Unseen hands grabbed her shoulder and threw her to the floor. Neela landed beside her. She struggled, but someone held her down and snatched away her sidearm before she could reach for it.

"The devil were you thinking Lieutenant?" Commandant Razia.

Essa got up onto her knees and looked. One of the commandos was standing close, looking like she was ready to send her back to the floor, either with a bullet or a hard kick to the side of her head. Razia came up beside her, carbine ready, but not aimed at anything.

Essa didn't speak.

"Is there a reason you're interfering with my operation?" Razia said.

Essa looked up. "After you boarded, the launch collided with the docking ring. Something pulled us in."

"Doesn't explain why you're here."

"Two of my crew were injured in the crash. One of them badly." Essa said, "It looked like we would find a breathable atmosphere inside, so we followed you through the airlock."

Razia looked furious, but said nothing.

"We followed you as far as you'd marked," Essa said. "But we lost your trail. Soon enough we found that—garden—and somehow it led us here."

"We saw what happened after you came through the airlock. We knew that you were tracking us and decided to lay up and see what kind of game you were playing."

Essa only counted four in the squad. There should have been one more. "Did you lose someone?" she said.

"Our medic. I sent her back to tend to your wounded." Turning to Neela, she said "You did a fine job with the projectile wound, or so the medic tells me. At least you remember your first aid training, because you don't remember a damned thing about following orders."

"As I said, Commandant, I was going to lose one of my crew."

"You're an officer. That's your problem." She suddenly turned away and examined the door from which Essa and Neela had just emerged. "And what were you doing in the command center?"

How did she know? Essa wondered. Before she could ask, Razia had pushed past her and opened the door. "Watch them," she said to one of the commandos, who made Neela and Essa get up on their knees and put their hands on top of their heads, faced away from the interior of the room.

Neela looked up at the commando, who kept her gun trained on them. "We need to get out of here," she said. There's something that's going to collide with this station in less than two hours."

The commando didn't react.

"Where are you from?" Essa said. After that didn't work, she said, "I used to live in a small town just outside of Armali. My mother designed prints for textiles." After another pause, "You must like to get dressed up on your days off, don't you? Do they even give you days—"

The comando's elbow stopped her sentence short. "Next one won't just quiet you," she said.

"We're all on the same side, here," Neela said. "How about if you tell us what's going on?"

"Maybe they won't tell her," Essa said. "Not important enough to know."

The commando hit her again, and this time the pain exploded across Essa's jaw. For a moment she thought the commando had broken it. One of her teeth felt loose, and a trickle of purple blood welled along her gums.

Essa spat it out onto the commando's foot, just to see what she would do. She didn't flinch or take a step back in revulsion. She didn't appear to notice it at all.

"How much longer are you going to keep us on our knees like this?" Neela said. "We need to get out of here."

"So you say," the commando said with a bloodthirsty grin. She looked like she was about to lash out again, but only pulled her weapon back in toward her body. In that moment, Essa saw everything as it should happen: she reached up and took the rifle, pulling it toward her. Surprised, the commando's hand clenched around the trigger and she fired a shot into the floor. Essa wrenched the weapon around, and placing her knee beind the commando's, pulled and shoved, and made her flail backwards, landing hard on the oxygen tanks of her suit. Not wasting any time, Essa dropped low and gave the commando two sharp blows from her elbow, and when these didn't appear to do the trick, two more that made her expression turn blank and her limbs go slack.

This, she thought later, was what she should have done, but instead the moment passed.

Commandant Razia was returning, in any event. She had a brief conversation with their guard, saying only, "We've got what we came for," leaving Essa to wonder what that might mean. To Essa and Neela, she said, "Right. Get up, and show us how this vehicle works. We should get out of here quick as we can."

"So you saw it, too?" Neela said, "The object approaching the station?"

Razia didn't answer, but her impassive expression suggested that she had.

The vehicle was big enough to hold them all, though it wobbled slightly whenever Essa tried to maneuver or accelerate. At least there was room for the commandos on the flatbed at the front of the little craft. They reached the end of the corridor, and came out into the ancient garden, where Essa deftly zipped up and over a mound of tangled roots, and began retracing the path she and Neela had followed on their way there. She began slowly, gaining speed as she gained in confidence. The vehicle shone a light that reached about twenty meters up ahead, and as Essa followed the track, she saw, and then attempted to swerve around something she thought she had seen running across their path. The craft spun, slipped sideways and struck a tree, throwing the commandos to the ground and slamming Essa's face against the controls.

Neela had split her lip open, and Essa felt like she'd broken her nose. A long trail of blood had formed in the time it took her to regain her senses. The commandos were mostly unhurt, aside from one who said she'd blacked out when she hit the ground, and probably had a concussion. One of them had lost her weapon.

"Search for it, and quickly," Razia said. "We don't have long—"

Everyone fanned out, and there in the lights from the hovercraft, was the thing Essa had swerved to avoid. Arms and legs, frozen in motion, one hand stretched out, as though reaching for something, the other, snapped off, legs bent slightly as though about to leap forward. Decapitated.

A statue. Perhaps representing the creatures that had built this place, though the body was ambiguous enough that it could still have been an asari, at least a small-breasted one. The broken arm lay at the base of the pedestal, but the head had been carried elsewhere.

The commando called out that she'd found her rifle. As she said this, the star that hung in the void above them glowed brighter, turning the twilight into day. Looking up, Essa saw that the two rings that held the star in place were turning much faster than they had been, were in fact, spinning so fast she could almost no longer see them. Razia looked up, her command presence suddenly broken. Everyone did the same.

A hum rose up through the ground and the trees and earth shook, filling the air with dust. A few moments later the sound became deafening, and the light nearly blinded them. The whirling rings disappeared, and what looked like a massive lightning bolt shot from the star out into space. The noise peaked and as it dropped away, Essa glimpsed a dark shape, lit by the energy passing into it that then hurtled away down the long rail of the station and vanished into the dark of space.

"What the devil was that?" said one of the commandos.

"I saw it, too," said another. "I think it was a ship."

No one answered, but just stared on in awe and the sort of terror reserved for things beyond all understanding.


	8. Chapter 8: Foundations

Foundations

Liara reached the dig site in half an hour. The remains of the demolished skyscraper were still being hauled away by a steady stream of shuttles that quickly rose from the ward and merged with the traffic heading up-arm, toward the processing center near Zakera Junction. Alera let her out, and flew away at once. The landing pad was in constant use. Liara hurried down into the interior of the building and met with the foreman, a young quarian, wearing a helmet to protect from falling debris, and a dusty coverall, but no envirosuit or rebreather gear. The quarian was gray-skinned, his large eyes fixing her with obvious intelligence. He several visible implants in his temples and chin and had several earrings in each ear.

Liara still smiled, seeing a barefaced quarian, even though they were becoming a common fixture on the Citadel. They'd even been granted an advisory—which is to say non-voting—seat on the council, along with the krogan and volus, who had received similar honors in the years following the war.

"Gell vas Mesto," he said—_Mesto _being the quarian word for Citadel_—_holding out his hand, then said, "Something funny?"

"No," Liara said, thinking of Tali'Zorah, who, near the end of her life had finally been able to take off the mask for good. "You remind me of an old friend. That's all."

Gell led her downward, on a long flight of makeshift stairs that swithced back and forth across the wall of what had once been the building's foundations. Debris lay scattered everywhere, and water leaked from old pipes into the pit below them.

"As I was saying," Gell began, though Liara didn't remember him having begun any explanation earlier, "It's not uncommon to find interesting stuff buried like this on the Citadel. It's just we usually dig it up before it gets to be a thousand years old."

"That old?"

Gell nodded. "It's dated. Eight hundred seventy-three years ago, by the old Asari calendar."

"What is it you found?" Liara said.

"Looks like a time capsule. Old keepsakes and the like. Insignia from different military units. Probably no one would have thought twice about it, but then we noticed the two data storage pods. That's how we know how old the thing is. We haven't seen tech like that since—well ever. Honestly it's so old you can't even call it tech anymore. It's more like junk the protheans would have thrown away."

"I've got a doctorate in things the protheans threw away," Liara said, patting the quarian's shoulder to let him know she understood what he'd meant. "Do the data pods still work?"

Gell shrugged. "The container stayed sealed, so they weren't damaged beyond what you'd expect. I'm guessing you're going to need specialized equipment to read them. Can't just plug them into your omni tool."

"Thank you, Gell," Liara said. "If you don't mind, I'd like to see the location where you found it."

Gell pointed down below, where there were at least two meters of standing water. "Diggers broke through a pipe. The whole subbasement filled up. I'm afraid you can't get down there, and demolition is going to continue on, water or no. Best I can do right now is hand over the capsule itself. We made sure to seal it back up for you."

"And how did you know to contact me?" she said.

Gell led Liara to the workbench where the capsule was had been laid out for her. "There's one other thing stamped into the capsule. It reads, 'Buried on this day by Benezia T'Soni.'"

#

Liara brought the capsule back to her apartment on Tayseri. It wasn't very large, about the size of three or four books stacked together, and no heavier. A series of bolts held it shut and its interlocking lid kept it sealed against the elements. Gell had opened it, and this bothered her. She was used to being the first to look at important information, and who knew what Gell had seen that she shouldn't have, or tampered with, or destroyed. Even assuming he were completely honest and forthright, the way things were arranged inside the container might have held a particular meaning that would now be entirely lost.

Her apartment occupied the top two floors of one of the taller structures on the ward, not far from Tayseri Point. From there, she could look out in one direction and see an endless stream of ships forming up to dock, and in the other, the long shadow the Presidium Tower cast over the wards. Liara stopped to look out the windows. Tayseri was passing through darkness as the Citadel rotated. It was never really night here, and the Wards never slept. Traffic buzzed at all hours, and up here one was never very far away from Widow's warming light. Down below things were different, where the lower wards were in a state of constant dusk. She stepped closer to the window and put her hand up to the glass, something she rarely did, ever since the attempt on her life, centuries ago now, back when she and Shepard were still hunting for the Shadow Broker. Before she'd taken his place. Before Shepard had vanished into a beam of energy and somehow made the reapers go away.

Liara imagined someone still might want to put a bullet in her head, but the barriers on this apartment were an order of magnitude stronger than what she'd had on Illium. They had to be.

It had been a long time, though, since someone had tried to kill her. Perhaps Shepard—or the memory she'd had in Shepard's Field—had been right. Perhaps it was time to move on.

Liara went downstairs, to the windowless interior room where Alera had placed the capsule on a workbench. She unscrewed the bolts and raised the lid. She found the contents as Gell had left them—hastily put back after realizing what he'd found. There were two pouches, each containing unit patches from three or four different military and paramilitary organizations. All of them had formed on Thessia, and most of them were from what had once been the Serrice Protectorate before the galactic expansion had given a kind of unity to the city-states. Which was to say, they were all very old. Most of the units had existed for generations before the discovery of the relays, and all but one had been either disbanded or merged with other outfits by the end of the Krogan Rebellions. Valueless in themselves, they seemed like an odd sort of keepsake for her mother to try to pass on.

Underneath these Liara found the data pods. Their power cells had oxidized and started to leak. She didn't hold out much hope that the data would be fully intact. Liara still went through the motions, connecting cables and flipping on her omni-tool. She was surprised to learn that both were operational, one apparently serving as a backup for the other.

Each contained a brief video recording of her mother. She opened the viewer, but left the image frozen before Benezia began to speak. There she was, her mother, two hundred and eighty-three years old, younger than Liara was now, and too much like her: unbonded, childless. Too mixed up in politics—among other things—to settle down and become a proper matron. Liara had always admired that about Benezia, even when it made her an uninvolved, aloof, and finally absentee mother. There she was in her office in Armali. Liara knew the room well, the shelves behind her, laden with books and keepsakes. Liara had encountered her first prothean artifacts there, most of them just broken fragments of their lost civilization, but then there was a data disk, too. Unreadable, but fascinating, nonetheless.

Liara had always suspected that her mother was involved in much more than just policy, but she'd never known for certain. Not until she'd put three bullets into her mother's chest and watched her die. This capsule seemed like proof, and the video file a confession.

Liara decided to wait a moment, to just sit there on the threshold of the revelation before diving in and knowing for certain. After a few deep breaths, she was ready, and allowed the video to play. Benezia didn't begin to speak right away, but instead stared into the camera for a few moments, apparently contemplating what she was about to tell her listener.

"This is a puzzle," she began. "One I haven't been able to figure out, and one I won't have time to understand. Circumstances. And I've been warned to—to mind my own business." After a pause, she said, "The warnings I've received have been _sufficient_ to keep me silent in this—in this lifetime." She went on, "Even now I'm perhaps afraid to say too much, except that I've discovered—something. I don't know what it means. Not yet." She sighed and shook her head. "But then, tell me not to ask questions and it only makes me curious."

The video cut out, and at first Liara thought there wouldn't be any more. Then the image came back. It was a different day, or at least Benezia had changed clothing, and looked even more troubled than before. "I've found it," she said. Liara studied the background when Benezia moved to the side. The weather had changed, because behind now rain was pelting the windows. A different day, for certain. "Not _it_. Not _the_ answer. But a clue of sorts." She let out a sigh and appeared to calm down. "It doesn't matter. I'm being sent to Esan in the Omega Nebula. I imagine this is to keep me out of the way. Whoever you are that finds this, you'll find my next package there."

The video stopped. A data file that opened automatically marked the coordinates of the colony.

Esan didn't exist any more. The batarians had occupied and annexed the asari territory three hundred years earlier, and eventually renamed the planet Lorek. A bloodless invasion, a rarity for batarians. But the Hegemony was too economically dependent on the slave trade for things to have ended well for the asari who didn't have the means to get offworld.

And now, of course, there precious little left of the Hegemony after the reaper invasion. Their fleets destroyed, their central government indoctrinated and then wiped out during the war, their colonial populations wiped out or scattered. Their capital, Khar'Shan was said to be a world of ghosts and ashes. They were rarely seen in Citadel space. And as much as Liara hated to see an entire race nearly eliminated from the galaxy, it had—for a time at least—made life in the Attican Traverse considerably safer for other species.

There had never been an official accounting of what had happened on Lorek. Unconfirmed reports said the colony had been entirely abandoned when the war hit. Who knew what Liara might find there.

Liara searched the remaining files on the data pod. Most of them contained information regarding the units whose insignia were contained in the capsule. Much of that information was redacted, leaving Liara to wonder whether the First Serrice Guards had engaged in a joint exercise with the Special Tasks Group, fought against them, or whether they'd been involved in covert action together.

#

Liara got up from the workbench and walked upstairs to look out the windows again. There she found Alera, who had laid a cloth out on the kitchen table and was taking apart the SMG she kept hidden under her coat.

"Sorry, boss," she said, clicking the pieces back together and holstering the weapon. She folded the cloth and returned it to her pocket.

Liara didn't say anything. Instead she went to the windows again. I dare you to try shooting me, she thought, looking out at the nearest building, all the many windows where a shooter might be lying in wait.

Alera said, "The councilor called. She wanted to know if you'd discovered anything interesting."

Liara shook her head. "Nothing yet," she said. She had learned over the years that it was best not to burden her associates with too much information. It would only put them in danger. More danger, she reminded herself.

The brief sunset created by the Citadel's rotation made her feel like she wanted get out and stretch her legs, perhaps do something a normal asari might do. Go to the lower wards with a friend and have dinner, for instance. Or browse the shops and arcades in Lower Tayseri. She knew it wasn't entirely safe, but on occasion she'd done it, and once had even, in spite of her better instincts, gone dancing. She knew how to handle herself, she thought. Liara turned to Alera and said, "Let's get out of here."

#

The lower wards had been buried in rubble for years after the final assault on the Citadel. No one would ever know that looking at them now. They'd been rebuilt, most of them in the same style—if not the same exact shapes—as they had been before the war. Traffic roared overhead, and the walkways were crowded with foot traffic, delivery drones, and wheeled vehicles.

Liara hadn't been down here, except for the rare expedition to meet a contact, in over a year. Before going out, she'd applied facial markings, adding a pale green stripes that extended from her eyes out toward her ears, and up from her chin around her mouth. They wouldn't fool facial recognition software, but it would make her less recognizable to casual observers. It was—barring hacking C-Sec's monitoring systems, or radical plastic surgery—the only way to enjoy even a little anonymity on the station.

Alera, walking slightly ahead of Liara, hand touching the opening of her coat, a quick reach away from her weapon, said over her shoulder, "What's the plan?"

Liara smiled. She said, "I'm tempted to give you the night off."

"I'm serious. What are we doing here?"

"Alera," Liara said. "Don't you ever do anything fun?"

"Never, boss," she said, though she was smiling.

"We'll have to do something about that," Liara said. Alera's omni-tool pinged.

"It's Gell," she said. "Says he has something for you." Liara motioned to put him through.

"Doctor T'Soni?" Gell said, once they were connected. Liara stepped into a narrow alley off the main thoroughfare. On balconies above her, laundry that had been hung out to dry floated in in the artificial breeze. Once she felt no one was watching, she motioned for Gell to continue. "We managed to get the subbasement pumped out," he said. "Since you were so interested in looking at the location where we found that—that thing—I thought I'd go have another look."

"What did you find?"

He sent her half a dozen images to examine. "As you can see, it was crammed into a pretty tight space. She must have put it here when the building was still going up. But I crawled into the pit and shone my light around. If you look closely, you can see there's something on the wall here."

Liara studied the image. "I don't see anything," she said.

"I thought you'd say that," Gell said. "So I moved my light around. Here it is again from a different angle."

Liara looked. Something was stenciled onto the wall with a kind of paint that only appeared when the light hit it at a certain angle. Commandos and the intelligence services had been using this marking system for centuries already, mostly for identifying buildings or rooms where targets were located, or, on a more limited scale, for marking dead drops. It meant that her mother had been using known dead drop locations, which would help limit her search when she got to Lorek. The mark itself was a simple combination of numbers, 303. Easy to overlook, but hard to mistake, if you knew what you were looking for. The number was an asari intelligence services designation, largely unused in the last several generations, signifying handwritten ciphers and codes. Liara made a note of that, wondering if Gell knew any of this, and said, "Thank you, Gell. Let me know if you find anything more."

Alera stood waiting for Liara in the shadows nearest the head of the alley. "Important?" she said.

Liara nodded. "We're leaving tonight. Have the ship ready."

Alera nodded, then made a subtle gesture. "We've acquired a few friends," she said. She wasn't looking directly at them, but two humans, a man and a woman Liara had noticed earlier had stopped walking and were leaning on the railing that overlooked the level below.

"I wonder what they want?"

"We could ask them," Alera said, balling her hand into a fist.

"No," Liara said. "Likely they'll have backup, probably circling in a vehicle overhead." Alera nodded in agreement. "Let's take them dancing."

"Humans can't dance."

"Then we'll have to teach them," Liara said. "But let's give them a little show, first."

Alera smiled, and playing the part of the good girlfriend, embraced Liara as they reached the head of the alley, two lovers who couldn't wait to get home before embracing eternity. Liara pretended to check the zips on her tunic and touched Alera's chin before they both stepped out onto the walkway, and disappeared into the foot traffic that in the lower wards never seemed to end.


	9. Chapter 9: Two Mutinies

By Essa's clock, they had spent close to fifteen hours aboard the installation. It took them eleven more to catch up to the _Nixia_. For the first time in many years, she felt strange going aboard a ship, as though she didn't belong there. Only the second mate had come to greet them inside the airlock, and she and Neela had to help each other get out of their space suits. The second mate said they were off duty until their next rotation, and so Essa was on her way down to the crew deck to get some food and find a suitable sleeping bag, when the captain pinged her.

"I need to speak with you," she said, her voice level as always, betraying no sign of anger over the disobeyed orders. "Particle lab, half an hour." Essa gathered, that the claws would come out when they met face to face on the science deck. The incident with the launch, the disobeyed orders—even though they had likely saved Talira's life. It was likely she could expect more than just a reprimand. She felt the lieutenant's tabs on her collar, and the patch on her shoulder that marked her as the ship's executive officer. A chill went through her, realizing she might be asked to remove them.

#

Essa made sure that Talira was resting comfortably in med bay, before she went to the science deck. The _Nixia _had recovered the probe during the last rotation, and now the science deck was teeming with crew from all three watches, all of them grouped around different displays showing data from the probe's time in the Orisoni system. Neela sat watching her team reconstructing the flight data. As Essa came near, Neela reached out and took her hand.

"We have over four billion images," she said, beside herself. "We're going to stitch them together to create video to show the people back home." She put an arm around Essa's waist and pulled her across the compartment to another screen. "Look at these," she said, pointing at half a dozen still images. There, Essa saw, was a planet that looked a lot like Thessia. Streaks and swirls of white clouds, blue oceans, continents covered in green and brown, and speckled with mountains. Several closer images showed lakes and rivers, bordered by what looked like forests. She and Neela exchanged a look.

"Habitable," Essa said, her voice only a whisper. She was thinking of the installation, and the creatures that had built it, two toes, three fingers and a thumb, a statue with no head.

"Not just habitable," Neela said. "_Inhabited._"

Essa studied the images again. "I don't see any settlements," she said. "I wonder—"

Her thought was cut short by the captain. Who, without preamble took her into the particle lab, left empty by the commotion caused by the probe's recent capture. Essa took hold of a rail stationed by one of the work surfaces and waited for the captain to speak.

Only the captain seemed at a loss for words. She looked, in fact, like a shell of her former self. Somewhere between at loose ends and terrified for her own safety. At last she spoke, "We will deal with your disobedience when we return to High Rock," she said. "In the meantime, there are other more pressing issues we are facing."

Essa nodded. She'd entered the lab prepared to be stripped of rank and duties, removed from the bridge, and sent below to await the return home for her eventual court martial. That may still come, but in the meantime at least she would have something to keep her busy.

"While you were out of contact, we received orders to capture the probe. There was nothing out of the ordinary there." Here she paused and swallowed. "You may understand that I was somewhat reluctant to leave our station, because we were aware of your medical emergency. I thought it prudent to radio back to High Rock and receive advice. After all, the lag we would experience in receiving their decision didn't matter. Two hours more of waiting would have only brought the probe nearer to our relative position." The captain sighed, remembering something unpleasant. She said, "A few minutes after we sent the transmission, the commandos summoned me down to the crew deck. They were armed, and Razia's second in command reminded me I had been given an order. She asked whether I intended to follow it. Never mind that they had just made it clear they've been monitoring all our communications, I told them I had radioed for clarification, and would abide by whatever orders I received at that time." The captain tilted her head back and showed a bandage she was wearing at the base of her skull. "You can see what they thought of my plan. They timed it perfectly, on third watch, when everyone was sleeping. They subdued me, cuffed me and told me I'd been relieved of command. According to them, Commander Razia is now in charge of this mission."

"That's mutiny," Essa said.

The captain shrugged. "It is, but they're keeping it quiet. I myself have been released and am free to move about the ship, provided I do not interfere, and that I stay off the flight deck. If anyone asks, I'm supposed to say I've been asked to assist with evaluation of the probe."

"I gather I'm relieved as well?" Essa said.

The captain nodded. "Yes."

"Who is running the flight deck, then?"

"Navigation and Sensors are as they were. Apparently they're loyal to this cause. I'm not entirely sure how, but the remainder of the deck officers are loyal to them. Second mate, too."

"They'll pay for this."

The captain shook her head. "I don't think they will. What we've found out here—" the captain gestured, throwing herself off balance. For a moment she drifted before bracing herself against the padded ceiling of the compartment. "What we've found here—it's too important. Any other issues, including my relief from command, your disobedience, the damage to the launch, I gather they will all disappear amid the noise."

"Razia doesn't seem the kind to sacrifice you for the sake of her own career," Essa said. "I suppose I shouldn't put it past her."

The captain shook her head. "This is bigger than a single officer's career. Serrice High Command has their hand in it. I don't understand their game, but I got a look at what's been going on down in the cargo bay for the past month. They've built up the cradle that holds the probe, constructed a new bracing and a new frame. But there's more, too. Power conduits and plasma tubes."

It didn't make sense to Essa. "Conduits running from the reactor? Perhaps they mean to run power to the probe in case its own fuel cells fail."

"No, lieutenant. The conduits and tubes run _toward_ our reactor. The tubes have unidirectional valves, and I inspected a few of them. I don't know what they're doing. I want you to take Neela down there. Tell her to make up some reason or another. She's in charge of the probe anyhow, so you should be able to get them to let her down there. See what you can figure out about what they're up to."

"Understood."

"Take this." The captain handed over an access card. "I took this while I was below decks a few days ago. You'll be able to enter the bay without raising any alarms."

Essa nodded. "We'll go when the rotations switch again. Things will have settled by then."

#

The _Nixia _had orders to return to High Rock, and the ship came about and executed a three-hour burn, the first of about a dozen that would eventually put them on a return path. They would pass within a million kilometers of the installation.

Essa spent the time talking with Neela, who sat rapt over her data. The probe had found three other planets, beyond the one that looked habitable. The planets had been documented previously with land-based telescopes, but now Neela could _put a face_ on them, as she said, adjusting her spectacles.

"We're going to have to name them," she said, smiling.

When the watch changed five hours later, Essa was still on the science deck, hovering close to the console where Neela was working, evaluating the data the probe had collected. The images it had taken were slowly compiling into a composite video, and while that was running in the background, she spent her time trying to determine how quickly the probe had actually crossed the three light-years between the Parnitha and Orisoni systems. It appeared that the probe had made the journey in less than three weeks.

"I wonder if we could survive acceleration like that," Neela said.

Essa shrugged. She was staring, transfixed at the images of the blue-white world, now turning slowly, a storm raging across the day-side. Then, as the planet rotated, the skies cleared and there was a coastline, a river delta, and a deep valley. The science deck was clearing out. Everyone had been working for a full day or more. Two of the crew, giddy with excitement, were playfully tugging at each other's clothing as they floated up the companionway to the crew deck.

"Glad to see someone's going to get a little azure tonight," Neela said.

Essa shook her head, "Let's focus."

They slid down the tunnel to engineering and then the aft observation post, encountering no one. At the hatch to the cargo bay, Essa tapped her card against the lock and it slid open. Neela pulled the hatch open and immediately went in. Essa followed her.

Neither of them made it very far into the bay, their path blocked by the probe, its cradle, and the network of power conduits and tubes leading from it. The two extra scientists who had come aboard were working at a console far below.

Essa and Neela made their way around the other side of the probe, using it as cover. Neela found a good place to peer out and watch, while Essa got a closer look at the work the technicians had done. Below the console, six of the ten commandos were asleep in bags they had strapped to the bottom of the cargo bay.

Essa picked her way down the back of the probe. Most of the conduits seemed to converge here. The probe had a drive system filled with roughly a ton of the mineral common on Thessia. While many of the mineral's properties were already well known, one thing that had only recently been discovered was that pumping electricity through it proved to be a reliable source of antiprotons, the annihilation of which was an efficient way to generate electrical power, and made a potent propellant for spacecraft. This was how the probe achieved such speeds. Now, though, it looked as though they had not only wired the probe's power generator into the _Nixia's _reactor, but connected the annihilation drive to the ship's main engines as well. What's more, is the framing they had used to surround the probe's cradle indicated that they meant to test that connection, so that the force generated by the probe's main thrusters would not tear it loose inside the cargo bay and send it careening upward through the rest of the ship.

Essa pulled herself up to where Neela was hiding and tapped her. "We need to tell the captain about this," she said. "Right now."

"We have a problem," Neela whispered. While Essa had been inspecting the probe, Razia and the remaining commandos had returned. They were hovering in the open space between the hatch and the top of the probe and didn't seem to be in any hurry to move out of the way. They appeared to be discussing something.

Essa and Neela floated closer, stopping behind a wide panel of shielding that kept them out of view, but that let them approach within hearing. One of the commandos was talking about a headcount.

"We went through the crew deck."

"And?"

"Two short," she said. "There were several empty bags, but it appears several of the crew are sharing."

"And you checked the launch?"

"Yes. It's empty, as are the exterior storage pods."

"Look again," Razia said. "They have to be somewhere. But keep it quiet. I don't want to upset the crew any more than we have to."

The commandos made ready to leave, but Razia called them back. "Bring me the captain. I think she might know where they've gone."

"Aye, aye." The commandos disappeared through the hatch.

Neela squeezed Essa's arm. "She knows we're here."

Essa shook her head. Just then the lights flickered. Essa whispered, "She knows we're coming. She doesn't know we're here."

The lights dimmed again, and Razia who now hovered alone in the space between the hatch and the probe took hold of the wall and spun herself around, trying to look over her shoulder. One of the scientists called out from down below, and Razia shifted around, moving out of Essa's view.

She turned and signaled to Neela, who already looked ready to move. Razia had floated downward. If they were careful they could slip by her unnoticed. Neela went first, gliding like a fish up toward the hatch and then through, without making a sound. The lights flickered again, dimmed, then came all the way back on. Razia looked behind her again before she went back to addressing the tech.

Essa saw her chance. Pushing off, perhaps not hard enough. She had almost reached the hatch, her fingers were just closing on the rail beside the circular opening when a hand reached up and caught her foot.

"I knew it!" Razia shouted. Her grasp made Essa spin out of control and crash into the pads around the hatch opening. Somehow she managed to maintain hold on the rail. She tried to kick Razia away. "Let me show you how to fight!"

Razia lashed out with both her arms, shouting a keening battle cry as she did. Two blows landed, one in Essa's ribs, the other against her tensed abdomen. The air left her lungs in a rush, but she quickly recovered, grabbing hold of Razia's arm, and pulling her in close, she spun the commandant's body around, and took her in a chokehold.

Slowly, like a snake crushing its prey, she increased the pressure. "Struggling will only make it worse," Essa whispered as Razia slowly fell into unconsciousness. When the commandant's body went slack, she counted to five before letting go. Essa shoved her away. As she did, the lights went out entirely.

Essa had drifted away from the hatch, but still had a sense of where it was. Her feet touched something solid, and she pushed away. An emergency light came on as she rose up into the aft observation compartment. Neela, she was pleased to see, had not bothered waiting for her, but instead had continued on. Essa hoped she had found a good place to hide. In engineering, only the red emergency lights were working, and a single screen showed that the entire computer system had apparently crashed and was attempting to restart. The screen kept printing the same thirty lines of code over and over, never getting past that first sequence.

She didn't have time to see if the backup generators were operating properly. Razia wouldn't be out for long.

Things were similar on the science deck. All the screens were flashing the same message. Essa searched the sleeping bags hung on the walls to see if Neela had found a place to hide from the commandos, but she didn't find her. The emergency lighting had woken up some of the scientists, and one of them called out as Essa made for the companionway, "Lieutenant, what's happening?"

Essa didn't answer but said, "Have you seen any of the commandos?"

"I—"

The ship's automated voice interrupted. "All hands, all hands. This is a general distress warning. Main power failure in central reactor. This is not a drill. All hands, all hands, report to general quarters stations at this time."

Essa pushed herself up, through the hatch to the crew deck. Same emergency lights, same screens showing the same system failure up here.

Except the commandos were there, and had taken hold of Neela and the captain. The lights came back on, and went out again. The ship seemed to shudder, and there was a loud pop from a maneuvering thruster. In the total black, Essa heard a scuffle, several blows, then the compartment seemed to explode in a ball of blue fire. For an instant the light burned the image of the captain being thrown backward while one of the commandos hit her with a burst of biotic energy. Ranged along the wall behind the commandos, a dozen shocked faces of personnel who only a few minutes earlier had been sleeping. Through the darkness, a body came flying, hit Essa square in the chest, and threw her against the back wall. She was pinned for a moment, before struggling to breathe she managed to push the body away. And then they were on top of her, fists and feet, elbows and knees striking her everywhere she wasn't protected, her ribs, her belly, her face. Her already broken nose broke again.

Suddenly the lights came on. In the moment it took everyone to get their bearing the ship seemed to roll out from underneath them, reorienting the room. The intercom spoke again.

"All hands, all hands. Main power restored. Secure for acceleration. This is not a drill. Thirty seconds. All hands, all hands, secure for acceleration."

The commandos looked like they wanted to continue fighting, but broke off and made for the nearest rank of seats. Essa grabbed Neela, who looked stunned, but not unconscious, and helped her buckle in. She had just finished strapping herself in—nineteen seconds left, according to the ship's clock on the far bulkhead—when she realized the captain wasn't there.

Essa keyed her communicator. "Captain. Where are you?"

"I'm headed below to find out what this bitch from Serrice is trying to do to us."

Essa reached for the buckle on her own straps. Twelve seconds. She sprang forward, past the rank of commandos into the long tunnel that connected to the flight deck. Maybe she could stop them from initiating the burn sequence.

There were no clocks in the tunnel, only the count she maintained in her head, and the silent anticipation of what was coming, as she flew up the ladder. Ten rungs left, eight seconds, two rungs, six seconds, at the hatch, three seconds, through the hatch and onto the deck, two seconds, finding the crew struggling to regain control of the ship. In the moment it took Essa to hurl herself into the captain's chair, the only available seat, she saw the second mate pulling the MASTER ABORT lever.

It didn't work. The engines roared to life. Essa felt the acceleration pushing her body off the seat, and with a final effort she forced the straps around her shoulders and waist and shut the buckle.

She called over the comm. "Captain?"

There was a short burst of static and perhaps the sound of shouting, then nothing. All further attempts to raise the captain were met with silence.

"What's happening here?" Essa said to the second mate.

"We're don't know!" she shouted. "The computers went down, the power cut out. It seemed like all of our systems were resetting themselves, but then—she waved her hands at the nav computer—"It's like it didn't just restart, but reset already programmed and ready to set a new course."

"Send a distress call," Essa said.

The second mate looked at her panel. "Can't," she said. "The radio is down. We're already broadcasting a signal on our narrow band array."

"Shut it off," Essa said.

After studying her console for a few more seconds, the second mate said, "Nothing's responding." She flipped a switch so they could listen over the ship's internal speakers. The sound itself wasn't as surprising as the fact that Essa had heard it before. She'd heard in the control room, less than a day earlier.

She called for the captain again, and again there was no answer. The _Nixia_ continued accelerating, its throttles fully open.

Then the maneuvering jets fired, throwing Essa off balance. She wondered if the _Nixia's _frame could handle the stresses. The signal they were broadcasting changed, the pattern of growls shortening and becoming more repetitive. To the second mate she said, "What is controlling the ship?"

"I don't know," she said, "but it's not us."

The sensors operator cried out, "Collision warning!"

Through the slit of glass, Essa looked out and saw the installation. They were approaching it end-on, perhaps as little as a thousand kilometers away. The little blue star glowed brightly now, and she thought she saw the rings spinning faster and faster.

She was watching the readout at the second mate's station. It, too, continued to show a repetitive code fragment. Essa wondered if that little loop of information was supposed to prevent the crew from interacting with the controls, while what ever was about to happen happened.

She sat watching the installation growing larger and larger in the windscreen, until it blotted out everything around it and was the only visible object in their sky.

She asked the sensors operator for the range. They were within ten kilometers of it now. It wouldn't be long, Essa thought. The acceleration held her pinned. A thin line of blood leaked from her twice-broken nose, and made her cough. She gasped, and spat, and then there was a flash of light and she thought they were all dead, because she and the ship and everyone in it seemed to stop existing, because they were not just weightless, but had no physical form and the stars seemed to jump from one place to another, and she saw Neela smiling at her from behind her spectacles, and wondered why she hadn't thought about Neela that way before, because clearly Neela thought that way about her.

And then they were adrift again. There was her body, there was the crew, and the _Nixia_ riding along underneath her. Essa coughed and gagged again on her blood. She undid her straps and drifted up into the cabin as the intercom, unbidden, spoke the All Clear.

The navigator had passed out, and the second mate was wiping her hand across her mouth as though she'd vomited. The panels had returned to their normal operational status: no more code fragments looping, just the standard readouts.

Essa opened a channel on the intercom. Wiping the blood from her nose, she spoke, "All hands, all hands. This is your XO speaking. Report to action stations for damage control and assessment. The time is currently—" she stopped to look at her watch "—seventeen fifty-one. Section heads report to crew deck by eighteen hundred hours." She closed the intercom, and ordered the second mate to send a distress call to High Rock.

Over her own comm, she tried the captain again. Instead she got Razia. "Lieutenant," she said, "I have some bad news. Your captain is dead."


	10. Chapter 10: Afterlife

It was impossible to travel through the Omega-2 relay without stopping to pay homage to Aria. Liara would have preferred not to dock and make the long pilgrimage to Afterlife. She didn't hate the Omegans, not all of them, but she hated the filth and the poverty and the violence. She was thinking about this last thing as she rode a public shuttle, thronging with passengers, some of them even hanging off the sides of the old crate, by holding on to jerry-rigged handholds bolted to the exterior, as it flew through one of the many hollowed-out galleries inside the old asteroid. The slums spread along the bottoms of the old mine pits, climbing the walls, not unlike the favelas she'd seen in Rio, only here they seemed more grim, perhaps because there was no daylight, or night, just the perpetual insufficient glow of artificial lighting. Down below, the different races had separated into enclaves: humans and turians lived in this gallery for the most part. The salarians and asari lived in others, all just as bad.

They passed over a gang of krogan Enforcers—the paramilitary unit Aria had created after her return to Omega—who were surrounding a storefront. They all wore black and yellow uniforms, and the civilians referred to them—quietly—as hornets. They were notorious for using deadly force as a first option.

The shuttle paused to let people off, and jostled as it rose from the stop. Liara bumped against one of the passengers; he patted down his pockets to make sure she hadn't relieved him of his valuables before returning to his datapad. Meanwhile, children ran up and down the aisle, pushing between the standing passengers, shouting, laughing.

It was always like this. Aria loved to make sure Liara knew her place: requiring her to dock her ship far below, in Omega's keel, instead of the much closer central hub. And of course, Liara had to come alone—no hired muscle, as per Aria's instructions.

She might have felt threatened, but Liara saw that at least three of the passengers were plainclothes thugs. They were there to both make sure Liara didn't stray from her prescribed path, and also that she didn't come to any harm. She was safe, but not trusted. Too important to kill, too dangerous to leave alone.

After another half an hour in transit, Liara was finally at the central station in the Gozu district, a short walk from Afterlife. The streets were different now. After the Cerberus War, as the locals called it, Aria had had a large number of buildings around the entrance to Afterlife demolished. Behind the nightclub's thick walls, were hidden emplacements that provided overlapping fields of fire to troops working within. Approaching the building would be nearly impossible without taking massive casualties. Beyond the cleared zone, the old Gozu had been leveled and rebuilt. The new buildings, already dirty, were still less shabby than the ones that had come before. The streets leading through the district, though, were a maze, another defensive measure of Aria's: blind alleys, narrow zig zag streets that ended in choke points that would only allow a trickle of attackers to pass through.

She made her way to the front entrance, where the bouncers—a batarian in body armor, and a turian wearing civilian clothing—gave her a quick look and then a nod. The people standing in the line that stretched some distance down the block grumbled and shuffled in place, while the armored batarian roared for them to shut up as the doors closed behind her.

Aria was in her usual place, her command center, conferring with her lieutenants. Liara waited while the bodyguard patted her down, giving her bottom a pinch as he finished. Liara glared at him.

"Do that again," she said, "and they'll be digging your teeth out of the walls, human." A little blue flare of energy flickered at the tip of her index finger. He only stepped aside and hefted his rifle, as Liara mounted the sairs.

Aria saw her coming, but made no motion to greet her.

"Aria," Liara said. "It's been a long time."

"Maybe it has for you." Hostile as always. Hostile as a default. "What brings you to Omega?" Still not looking up.

"It must be the weather," Liara said. She sat down, not bothering to wait for Aria to offer.

"I liked it better when that human bondmate of yours was still running around, doing _my_ errands for _me_." Aria leaned back and looked out over the crowd spread out over the dance floor below. "Why should I help _you_, though. You've never done anything for even used to turn my own men against me."

Liara shrugged. "It's true. I did." After a pause, she said, "I don't regret it. And in any event, I didn't come to ask for help. I assumed you needed my assistance."

Aria laughed. "Impertinent girl," she said. "It will be a dark day on Omega if I ever find myself coming to _you_ for help."

"I know there were more than a few of those during the war," Liara said.

"And yet here I am," Aria said, spreading her arms. This is mine, the gesture said. I know you want what I have.

"I'll ask you again," she said. "What brings you here?"

"I suppose I could try telling you about how I've returned to my research."

"That's an amusing cover story," Aria said. "I know it isn't true."

"Yes, well," Liara said. "I'm on my way to Esan."

"It's been a long time since anyone's called it by that name."

"True enough," Liara said. "I'm looking for something that was there long before the name changed."

Aria sighed. "Good luck finding what you're searching for," she said. "I doubt you'll have any luck. The batarian you saw at the door? He's the grandson of one of the only families that escaped the reaper attack. There's nothing there but ghosts and ashes."

"We'll see about that."

"Do what you like. Just don't bother me with it, and don't let it blow back here. Respect those two things, and I'll _allow_ you to leave."

Liara nodded. She rose to go, then stopped at the head of the stairs. "Aria," she said, "I've always wondered, now that you're—well, getting on in years—whether you'd given any thought to who might succeed you." Aria glared and half moved to get up. Liara spread her hands apart. "It's an honest question."

"Telling the truth gets people dead," Aria said. "You of all people should know that. Now, get the fuck out of here."

#

Liara returned to the central station to take the shuttle back to the lower docks. Her three watchers followed. Once they were aboard the shuttle, though, a curious thing happened. One by one, each got off the shuttle, and no one entered to replace them.

So, Liara thought. Perhaps she'd touched a nerve, mentioning a successor, an _heir_. Not many knew that Aria had once had a daughter. Even fewer were foolish enough to mention her—even obliquely. Liselle had been murdered by her human lover some two centuries earlier.

Now who or what did Aria have? An empire of sorts, a command structure she could dominate, but that wouldn't hold once she was gone. Once Aria left Omega, either in a box or on her own two feet, the place—so everyone assumed—would descend again into chaos. And Aria _was _getting on, after all. No one knew her exact age, but she'd been running Omega for a good eight hundred years. Many estimates put her age at well over a thousand years old, making her one of the oldest living asari, and perhaps one of the oldest living individuals in the galaxy.

Perhaps it had been foolish to challenge Aria like that, or perhaps it had been necessary, to see how she would react. In any event, Liara had learned something important by it. Aria really knew none of the details about her voyage to Esan, or Lorek as it was now called. It had been worth the risk to learn that much, to know that she was fumbling for information.

Now, though, her punishment was coming.

Soon the shuttle would stop at the central hub. From there, Liara would have to transfer to a ferry that would fly her down to the moorings on the lower keel. Liara decided to get off before the final stop, but as she made for the front of the shuttle, two young turians, got to their feet and pushed her back toward a third, who had positioned himself behind her. Liara didn't wait to see if they were armed, but instead turned to face the man who was behind her, and knocked him flat with a slash from her elbow. She dodged over his fallen body and toward the shuttle's open rear door.

It was too far to drop all the way to the rooftops below, but Liara wasn't thinking about jumping. Instead she swung herself up, using the makeshift handrails, onto the shuttle's roof. The turians didn't bother following, but instead started trying to shoot her through hull. A few bullets made it through, but most of their shots ricocheted around the interior. One of them apparently struck the shuttle's pilot, because the craft veered off course and began descending at a shallow angle toward the neighborhood below.

She lost her footing, sliding toward the front of the shuttle. Now the turians were trying to scramble out, too. One fell, his body landing in the street a hundred meters below. The other made it to the roof. Liara looked to see if he was going to try and finish the job, but he was young, and apparently more concerned with saving himself. His mandibles flared in panic, as he scrambled to hold on.

They didn't have much time. The shuttle was less than twenty meters above the rooftops, and rocking violently back and forth as it struck an antenna attached to the roof of one of the taller structures.

The shuttle veered to the left, into oncoming traffic. Down below was an open topped barge, its belly full of something that looked reasonably soft. The shuttle pitched downward again, and Liara, running upward, toward the back of the shuttle, tackled the turian, and together they tumbled downward, into the barge.

They landed hard, enough to knock the wind out of her, but she wasn't hurt otherwise. The barge was filled with compost bound for the reprocessing center. Excellent for absorbing the shock. In every other way unpleasant. Two blocks away, the shuttle crashed into a building with a sickening thud, and then a detonation that knocked Liara onto her back.

She'd landed on top of the turian, and he'd taken most of the force of the impact. One of his mandibles was broken, and perhaps his leg, too. He groaned in pain, then, looking up and seeing Liara, flinched and covered his face.

"I'm not going to hurt you," she said, pulling him up by his collar. "Not any more than I already have."

He groaned again, and said, "All right. Now what?"

"This barge is an automated drone. We should be able to reprogram it to let us off nearby." Liara got up and started for the back of the vessel, where the guidance systems were located. "By the way," she said. "Your friends are dead. For your sake, I think it's best if you disappear, too. Aria doesn't take failure lightly." She pulled open the panel to the guidance system, and flipped on her omni-tool. She directed the barge to a nearby terrace, from where they made their way inside, and down half a dozen flights of stairs. The turian's leg wasn't broken, but he wasn't walking properly.

"I can get you medical attention when we arrive at my ship," Liara said. "But until then you have to keep up. I won't hesitate to leave you behind."

"Maybe you should have thought about that when you threw me off the shuttle," the turian said.

"I needed someone to break my fall."

Out in the street, there were pieces of wreckage from the shuttle, rubble from a collapsed wall, and a mangled body thrown from the crash. Two dozen people, mostly turians and a salarian work crew, had come out to look at the ensuing fire, and some were getting organized to put it out.

Liara saw the turian looking up at the burning building. A female turian jumped from the upper levels onto the awnings of the market stalls that lined the narrow street below. More followed her through the window. One of them missed and hit the pavement. Screaming.

"Is this your neighborhood?" Liara said. The turian nodded. She grabbed his arm and made him look at her. "I'm sorry. There's nothing we can do. If you want to live you have to come with me." He hesitated, then she said, "This way," pulling him again, down an alleyway partially blocked off by a dumpster and empty carts. In the narrow dark, two vorcha whelps tumbled together, biting and scratching each other, lashing out with their claws. Clotheslines overhead kept out what little light that filtered in from the street. The vorcha went after the turian's leg and he kicked them way.

Liara picked her way down the alley as it jogged right and left, finally emerging into a small square built around a communal fountain. From this angle, she could see the hole the shuttle had made in the building. One of its winglets protruded from an apartment halfway up the six-level building. Above the third floor, black smoke mixed with bright flame. A truckload of Enforcers pulled up at the head of the square, forcing Liara to dive behind a column. The turian followed, favoring his leg.

"You'd better not call out to them," Liara said.

"Don't worry," the turian said.

Meanwhile the krogan dismounted from their vehicle, each one holding a heavy shotgun. A second vehicle pulled up, this one loaded with forced laborers. The krogan began pulling them from the back of the truck, shouting for them to get to work and firing shots in the air, in case it wasn't already clear what failure to follow instructions might mean.

Liara and the turian hurried down the next alleyway. The transit hub wasn't far, but now Liara would need a way to get off Omega without being discovered. That would have been hard enough if she were on her own, but now she had the turian to worry about.

"Are you armed?" she said. The turian reached inside his tunic and pulled out a small pistol. "Give it to me," Liara said. He hesitated then turned the weapon around to hand it over, grip-first. "Wise choice, friend," Liara said. There was more shooting behind them, and the sound of more vehicles arriving. Liara moved faster. Enforcers would be swarming the neighborhood to make certain she hadn't survived the crash.

The alley led into another small square, bordered by low storefronts. Beyond it was a district filled mostly with shabby warehouses, many of them looked abandoned. If they went there, the krogan wouldn't have to be as careful about where they shot. They might even bring in a gunship or two. Liara crouched in the shadows, then started to break across the square. Just as she did, a vehicle flew low overhead. Several troops dropped out onto a rooftop nearby, then a few more onto one closer. There was shouting and loud crack. Nearby a window shattered. Liara ran now, forgetting the turian, and firing blindly over her head. She reached the next alley. The turian rolled in behind her.

"Thanks for the covering fire," he said. "Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine." Liara said, though she had a scratch on her neck. She peered out, drawing a salvo of small arms fire. They weren't going to make it. Not running like this. She needed to think. She got up and pushed the turian down the alley. "They'll have us surrounded in sixty seconds," she said. "I need to know if you can move." The turian nodded, saying that he could. "And you're not wounded?" she said.

"It's hard to tell."

Liara found a door about halfway down the alley. She kicked it open and found that it led to an interior stairwell. She pulled the turian in and shut it behind her, gesturing for him to be silent, then began moving up the stairs.

They needed a vehicle, she realized. They weren't likely to find one unguarded in such a poor district. Until they did, they'd need to stay out of sight. Liara picked the building's third floor, and left the stairwell, hurrying down the squalid tunnel of a corridor.

They had a few minutes at the very most, Liara thought, to disappear. They could do it, slip beyond the dragnet and get to safety, but they had to move.

The corridor was a dead end, but as Liara had suspected, there was a seam where several sections of prefabricated habitat material came together to a single point. She tapped the masonry with the butt of her pistol, finding a weak point then fired three rounds into the wall. When the dust cleared there was a hole big enough for them to pull themselves through. A krogan wouldn't fit, but she and the turian would. She pushed him through first, then, pocketing the pistol, followed him.

They reached the end of the next corridor, and descended again to street level. Here the crowds were still thronging, still full of people going about their business despite the commotion just two blocks over, and at present no patrolling krogan. Liara found a terminal and ordered up a cab. It would take a few minutes to arrive. In the meantime, she led the turian to a recessed doorway, where they could watch from cover.

"Will it wait for us?" he said.

"We'll see it come," she said then asked, "What's your name?"

"Varian," he said.

"Liara." She took his hand. Then, without letting go, pulled him closer and bent back his thumb. "What did Aria send you to do? Kill me?"

He cried out from the pain. She let up and he said, "We were just going to rob you. That's all."

"You came in heavily armed for a robbery."

"We knew who you were."

"Then you were unprepared."

The turian thought about that for a moment. "Yes," he said.

Liara glanced at her watch, then at the street. "Then what was your mission?"

"This morning, some human came up to us, handed us your picture and said, 'Hey, rough up this asari. See if she's got anything interesting in her pockets. Maybe we'll let you run your own crew if you do this right.'" After a pause he said, "So we came to rough you up."

"He came to you this morning?"

"Yeah," Varian said, "Why is that important?"

Liara shook her head. "It's not."

"And you know that it was Aria that sent you."

"Does anything happen here without her approval?"

"Not much," Liara said. "I'll give you that."

There was their car. Varian started for it, but Liara stopped him. Someone else approached the cab and a second later machinegun fire ripped through both the car and several people standing nearby.

"I thought so," she said. "Come on, quick. Around the back."

They circled the block, maneuvering behind the troops—a mixed group of six human and krogan mercenaries—that had just shot up the cab. They'd arrived in a small craft with exterior seats that afforded quick dismount for a squad of soldiers, with a sealable compartment for a pilot and passenger. The troops were moving up the street and fanning out. A pair of them inspected the wreck and dead bodies. One of the people they'd shot was still moving, and they were shouting for them to stay the fuck down. Meanwhile the pilot had opened the hatches so he and his copilot could have a smoke. One turian and one human. Neither was wearing any kind of armor.

"Perfect," Liara said. "Go talk to them."

"What?"

"You want to get out of here?" Liara said.

Varain thought, then said, "What am I supposed to say?"

"Just get them talking. I'll handle the rest. Come at them from the copilot's side, all right?"

Varian nodded. He got up to go, but Liara held him back. She said, "Do anything to alert them or the troops up ahead, and I'll kill you, too."

Liara waited as Varian hobbled down the street and then across the square to the small craft. She didn't like leaving her survival up to this young turian. After all, he'd already botched one operation today. She crept down the street, using a low wall as cover, then slipped around the other side of the vehicle, coming in close behind its engine compartment and fuel cells, within hearing of the pilot and copilot, who were talking to Varian.

"I lost track of her," Varian was saying. One of pilots asked what he meant. "I was part of the team sent in to take her out."

"Some job you did," the pilot said. He was the turian, and there was an undertone in his voice that suggested Varian should be ashamed of himself for his failure to complete his mission. "We're in this shit, because of you," he said.

"At least we're getting paid extra, Talus." This was the copilot. There was another round of shooting at the far end of the street. Liara saw her moment. She grabbed the pilot by the collar and tried to pull him out, but he was still buckled into his seat, so he only came partway before he began to struggle against her.

She struck him twice with the pistol and he stopped fighting. The copilot reached for his sidearm but Liara was already pointing the pistol at him. "Out, or I kill you both." When he didn't move fast enough, she shot the pilot in the leg. Then she unbuckled the turian and threw him onto the ground. The human copilot jumped to the ground on his own, and Varian got in, as the craft was rising from the street.

Liara spun the vehicle in the opposite direction, but only rose a few meters off the ground, going as fast as she dared. The streets came to a bottleneck, where a crowd of close to a thousand people had gathered, their faces lit by the flames rising from the burning building. A group of humans with assault rifles and shotguns were trying to hold them back from the area. There was a loud rumble behind them, and an impenetrable cloud of dust filled the street. Liara rotated the craft upward. The building had collapsed.

Their ship cleared the dust cloud, and there was the dark shape of a gunship, prowling down below them, following one of the streets by the warehouses. Its gunports lit up, shooting at something on the ground far beneath them. From somewhere small arms fire struck their ship, but didn't cause any vital damage.

Two kilometers ahead was the transit hub, where they ditched the little ship, and instead climbed into a cab that Liara hacked to fly them off the station. As they flew off station, Liara contacted Alera, who unmoored the ship, and caught up to them at the edge of the asteroid field, opening the cargo bay, and then jettisoning the vehicle once Liara and Varian were safely aboard.

On deck, Liara went to her cabin to get cleaned up and put on fresh clothing. Before she did, she had her crew take Varian down to the med bay, where they tended to his injuries. An hour later, she found Letha and Karen standing outside the med bay, watching Varian, who lay sedated and sleeping on the lower bunk.

"Sweep him for tracking devices. Disable any you find in his clothing. If you find implants, leave them alone. Meanwhile, find out what you can about him. Record keeping on Omega is spotty, but you might turn up something interesting."

"Understood," Letha said.

Liara went up to the flight deck to sit with Alera, and monitor the sensors.

"We got lucky today," Alera said. "Not many people escape from a dragnet like that."

"I don't think it was luck," Liara said. "The turian we've got below decks was engaged this morning to assault or perhaps even kill me."

"We were still on the other side of the Omega-2 relay this morning," Alera said. The ship had cleared the asteroid field and they were beginning to accelerate to FTL on a vector toward the Fathar system.

"Exactly. I think Aria was expecting him to fail."

"What does she gain by having you killed?"

"That's precisely what confuses me," Liara said. "It could be she changed her mind and only gave the kill order later." The ship was running at top speed now, inside its own bubble of darknesss as it outstripped the light of the surrounding stars. Then she had an idea. Liara got up and stepped into the comms cabin.

"When we get to Lorek, let's send Aria a message," she said to Drummond.

"Certainly," Drummond said. "What should it say?"

"Better luck next time."


End file.
